The Letters 2007

Arsen Savadov made ‘The Letters’ with what looks like watercolor or gouache, layering washes of translucent color into being. I’m imagining him composing the scene and the figures in it, all these toiling workers, perhaps like an allegory, each carrying or moving a letter of the alphabet. I can almost feel the artist's struggle, trying to wrangle the chaos of language into some kind of order, piling up one letter on top of another. There is a sense of labor and construction, but also the fragility of meaning and the ever-present possibility of everything collapsing into a mess of words. Just look at the way he applies the medium in watery washes; it gives the whole image a kind of dreamlike quality. I wonder if Savadov was thinking of Fernand Léger’s paintings of construction workers? There's something similar in the way they both find beauty in the everyday, turning ordinary subjects into something monumental and profound. Painting is a process that can capture the energy of embodied action, the artist’s and perhaps our own too.