Jackie Kazarian at O’Connor Gallery

 A review of Jackie Kazarian at O’Connor Gallery, Dominican University

Jackie Kazarian,  Um 1, 14 x 11, Acrylic on panel, 2023

Not all of Kazarian’s pieces in this show suggest impending cataclysm so much as the piece shown above, but there is an edgy anxiety about them all.  A powerful, uncontrollable force is arriving - both beautiful and deadly. Nothing here relates to a specific event - but it’s not surprising that in 2016  the artist painted a 26 foot long canvas marking the hundredth anniversary of  the Armenian genocide. 

There is something like a Japanese aesthetic at work here - a feeling of immediacy and impermanence - accentuated by the swift movement of a paint laden brush.  That bright, clear, fresh feeling of NOW is what I most enjoy in this work - especially  in the twisting spatial gymnastics executed by some of the brush strokes.  Disaster is always immanent- but that’s the nature of being alive - and life is a beautiful thing.

"Um 1", the piece shown above, is  a study for a larger painting, but it also stands alone as a fine painting itself.    

Jackie Kazarian,  Umwelt 1, Acrylic, watercolor, rice paper on paper, 40 x 40, 2023

The larger pieces in this show, however are mostly problematic - or perhaps this reviewer just cannot handle so much aggression and chaos.  Wesley Kimler is another local artist who works a similar territory though Kazarian is more about wonder and less about horror.  She creates a rich, complex, often overwhelming environment — much like the super-fast transformations of our civilization.

Jackie Kazarian, Um 5, 16 x 16, acrylic on panel, 2023

This one feels like a walk through the commercial center of a country I have never visited. Information overload. Too much excitement.  I am already lost.  Compositional elements seem to have been selected because they were the most unexpected - which is not uncommon in local non-objective painters ( Magalie Guerin, Molly Zuckerman- Hartung)

I first discovered Jackie’s work as hung in the back room of a Suzanne Doremus show at Zolla Lieberman Gallery., which is something of a coincidence, since Doremus herself was discovered by an art critic, Dennis Adrian,  in the back room of someone else’s show.  What goes around comes around?