Through painting, and more recently, sculpture and collage, Kamrooz Aram’s practice explores the classification and hierarchies of art history. Grounded in eurocentrism and informed by colonial conquest, understandings of Islamic art—itself a European discipline—have been formulated through contradistinction. Relegated to the category of “decorative arts,” Islamic artistic practices, a term perhaps too expansive to hold much meaning, have been historically dismissed as lacking the fundamental characteristics of the “fine arts”; their focus on abstraction rather than figuration, favoring ornamentation over representation and failing to privilege the individual artist have justified their labeling as crafts, utilitarian rather than conceptual in nature. Elusive Ornament is a quiet exhibition, beautifully composed and rigorous, in which Aram continues his interrogation of the assumed distinctions between painting and its oriental “other,” revealing that instability is in fact at the core of these enduring categories.
The paintings included in Elusive Ornament come from Aram’s “Arabesque” series, the title of which the artist both problematizes and reappropriates. Writing about the term, he has suggested that, as an Iranian often misidentified as Arab in America, he himself is “Arabesque” while simultaneously recognizing that “there is no such thing as the Arabesque.” In one corner of the gallery, two recent oil paintings—Scrutinuity (2022) and Wall Garden (2022)—exemplify his use of the gridded canvas, one of the hallmarks of modernist painting’s autonomy. And yet while operating within this paradigm, Aram pushes against its integrity. Through a vibrant but controlled palette, the structure of his grids holds tensions that somehow work in harmony: bold curves and organizing lines coexist alongside hasty brushstrokes, paint unevenly applied, at times dark and thick, elsewhere sheer, almost to the point of being erased.
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