Rhapsody

Overview

Rhapsody brings together the works of Narek Arzumanyan and Artur Eranosian in a dialogue defined not by similarity, but by contrast. Both artists share a birthplace in Yerevan and lives shaped by migration across Europe, yet their approaches to painting diverge radically. The exhibition positions this divergence as its central structure.

Arzumanyan’s practice is marked by density and intensity. His paintings accumulate imagery drawn from folklore, memory, and personal mythology, where figures and symbols coexist in unstable, often contradictory relationships. The surface is physically charged, shaped through forceful application that pushes the material toward tension. Painting becomes an act of confrontation, where meaning remains open and unresolved.

Eranosian’s work moves in the opposite direction. Emerging from photography and later shifting fully into painting, he constructs compositions defined by reduction and clarity. Flat planes of color are arranged with precision, creating quiet spatial structures in which narrative is absent. Meaning arises through restraint, balance, and the gradual removal of excess.

Seen together, these two practices articulate complementary responses to a shared condition shaped by displacement and transnational life. One expands through accumulation; the other through subtraction. Between them, Rhapsody frames painting as a space of translation rather than resolution a continuous movement between instability and form.

Presented simultaneously in Istanbul and Belgium, the exhibition extends this logic beyond the studio into geography itself. Its meaning shifts depending on where and by whom it is encountered, remaining open, unstable, and in process.