THE OTHER SIDE OF PINK 

Tsolak Topchyan's creative process involves the long and arduous work of patiently stitching, thread by thread, the fabric of a canvas and when finished,  beginning a new one. While passing time carrying out these repetitive movements, the artist inscribes the experience of the body and its temporality onto the canvas’s flat surface, from which modernism, or rather modernist criticism, has expelled both temporality and corporeality. Tsolak is weaving a funerary shroud for modernist painting and its claim to medium specificity – paint adhering as closely as possible to the flat canvas and undoing the separation between foreground and background. But as he weaves this funerary shroud, he also undoes it. While overcoming modernism, he engages with it from within. The large canvases with dots stitched into them, or lines “drawn” through pink thread, do not use paint. They are as flat as they can be, but they hang freely in space allowing the viewer to walk around them. Here, the materiality of the colored thread and the canvas is not overcome by visual abstraction but emphasized, brought to light, and insisted upon. Tsolak’s Pink Dots, 118 inches tall and 55 inches wide, are stitched on both sides of the canvas, where the front can appear as back, depending on the position of the viewer. Pink Running Stitch, of the same size, provides pathways for a visual journey and yet brings no foreclosure. The loose ends of the threads are left hanging, defying the structural coherence of the geometric lines while the gaze wanders about in the maze of pink lines. Tsolak spends time in order to make space for it. In the long hours of threading the needle into the canvas, grid by grid, through controlled gestures and self-imposed rules, he steals time from the urgency of everyday life and dedicates it to the non-productive labor of making artwork. This temporality is inscribed into the artwork itself, like gestures crystalized in patterns.

 

The tactile nature of visual experience is especially explored in his sculptural objects. In Pink Spheres, Tsolak moistens the paper, crumbles it, and presses it by hand until the spherical shapes are formed. Through the pink paint applied on the objects and then varnished, the paper’s bleached whiteness shines and the uneven surfaces of the spheres are crisscrossed by a network of threads formed by the act of crumbling and pressing paper. He thus emphasizes  the capacity of the hand to form inert matter, to imprint its movements and physical effort upon objects, while at the same time being guided through the material properties of the objects themselves. The artist’s movements are indexed in the spheres as they “roll” into a life of their own as autonomous art objects. 

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Similar to Pink Balls, Pink Tiles are formed through a complex process of material transformation. But as opposed to the spheres, they strive to efface the traces of artistic labor. The pink tiles are shown unframed, with the wall functioning as a background. Three hundred ninety similarly sized and numbered tiles, approximately 1 ¼ x ¾ inches each, all in the same color but in slightly different hues, and lined up in three rows, form a belt on the white wall. Each tile is made in an elaborate process of shaping and transforming raw matter. White clay is infused with pink, rolled into sheets, dried, and cut into small rectangles. These are then individually polished with a file, varnished, and placed next to each other. The desire for their identity and the concealment of the elaborate artisanal process in the production of these seemingly mechanical units come into tension with their apparent unevenness and non-identical character. This belt that cuts through the surface of the wall oscillates between its painterly qualities and its object-like character, like the canvases that open up towards space and time. It is this tension between matter, medium and experience that makes the works so contradictory as well. Adhering to the wall and striving for two dimensionality, they remain three dimensional. Striving for mechanical identity, they remain indexical. Behind the soothing and palatable pink, the signifier of ideologically infused happiness and flashy pop culture, there lurks a referent that points to an experiential content that is replete with contingency, contradiction, and the stuff of the everyday.

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Tsolak turned from painting to working with fabric and thread in 2020, during the war in Nagorno Karabakh. While in Brazil, he began creating camouflage nets by cutting through large sheets of fabric, just like dozens of women in Armenia who were producing camouflage for the fighters in Karabakh. From his isolation, he was joining a collective effort. The camouflage net as an artwork can be seen on purely formal terms, as displaying a play of form and color. But it is also strongly referential, invoking a military context. Similarly, Tsolak’s works with pink on white, produced through meticulous precision and subtlety, sensitive to light and air, upon a closer look, are the other side of experiential content. They distill the contradictions of everyday life and present them as pure forms, seemingly emptied out of any referentiality. The formalization of war, however, doesn’t overcome this painful context but sublimates it in arduous and strenuous work. In Tsolak’s native city of Gyumri, there is a saying, “my black heart, versus your pink panties.” The luminescent pink chosen as the only color for this exhibition, travels to New York, the temple of high modernism and consumer culture, in a suitcase. Whether this suitcase carries the “black heart” or only the “pink panties,” is for the audience to judge.