Aram Chaled Res

Aram Chaled Res 

"Looking deep into the aesthetics of Arabic script and its visual music without approaching the word itself."

Born in Syria, living in France. 

President of the Association "Artists over the frontiers International Art and Culture Association" France
Member of IGBK "International Association of Fine Arts in Berlin"
Member of the IAA "International Association of Art, UNESCO Paris
Member of the Association of Fine Arts United (BBK), Germany
Member of the Association of Fine Arts, France
2001 - 2005 - Creation and direction of the Free Academy of Art Gttingen / Germany (Freie Akademie der Knste Gttingen)

Aram Chaled Res: Language-scapes and Their Music

“I Work on looking deep into the aesthetics of the Arabic script and its visual music without approaching the word itself. I work away from the line and its designing principles and rules. I consider the Arabic script a body that has its own shape, curvature, depth and heights; it’s soft, compassionate and delicate. I do not take this script from its readable dimension, but from its visual perspective and dive into it to make a visual text. I have a very passionate relationship with the script. This script takes me into its own musical world which is gained from the visual music that I feel and see in the scripts of the Holly Quran. My paintings are a world in which I discover myself.” Aram Chaled

The contemporary Arab visual text artist has a bountiful tradition from which to learn, become an addition to and then pass the unique vision onto the next generation. If the artist sources from the cultural heritage of the vast Islamic cultural sphere, the three primary components of this tradition are calligraphy, geometry and the interlacing and interconnecting patterns known as arabesque. A fourth component, depending upon the artist’s inclinations, is miniature painting. Then there are the choices of blending these elements with those from the wider evolving global contemporary scene with its 100 year period of countless short lived ‘isms’. Some ‘isms’ created visual texts with words and letters emptied of layered meaning focusing on form, whole or fractured, generally unbalanced and chaotic that is in opposition to the generally demanded balance and geometrics of Arabic textual art.

Aram Chaled Res earlier painted visual texts are found within these historical, modern and post modern fields and as a member of the contemporary evolving global tradition added textual layers found deeper in his region’s history and prehistory between the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Indus River. This area contains a vast and rich heritage of visual rock art symbols and one of the cultural zones where writing developed. Characters and symbols from early rock art to the precursors of Arabic script were sourced by Aram and mixed to create highly vibrant, colorful and rhythmic painted visual texts prior to the current series. The Arabic letters that developed and evolved out of this deep era become musical notated rhythms expressed in his latest painted visual texts.

Winds pull dune sand, here coastal and elsewhere desert, grain by grain raking intricate sculpt curvilineal sensual lines reminiscent of long cursive flowing Arabic script. Wind pulses between grains a music one can imagine, contemplate or penetrate by reaching into the bright intuitive line at the highest limits of the intellect and then the deep dive within to realms beyond the mind’s reach out of which to create language-scapes. Such can be the impressions generated viewing and musing on, with and deep inside Aram’s current Arabic based visual texts.

Among his multimedia works, newspaper text— perhaps a symbol of the transitory, the ephemeral, societal misdirection focused away from the positive and healing energies — is painted over. We can contemplate this as a willful act opposing the negativity of mass media or a gesture of hope lovingly suggestive for a global reach towards the higher vibrations of consciousness.

The seemingly void of image, the about to be painted surface, flat or sculpt, is not separated from Aram because it guides his strokes as much as his deepest inner most self probings were found are the shapes of the music he hears that then form and meet with their color and shape on this surface. Nothing is preplanned except perhaps the material field upon which to paint his music. In order not to directly influence the viewer’s experience of the completed work, he generally refuses to name a work or mention influences so that the viewer in turn can over come what seems the enigmatic by diving deep into contemplation on and into the work and perhaps meet Aram at the work’s source. He has said that his work comes from a deep mystical place. Such a space is beyond language and found in light; this is where he hopes to pull his viewers to, the light made by the sound of love.

Karl Kempton

Oceano Ca
May 12, 2014

(Extracted from the Introduction to catalogue: Aram Chaled Res, 2014)