Ari Glass on Optimism and Alienation

At the Gallery of Events, today at 7 pm, Ari Glass will open his latest exhibition titled "Beyond the Mental Picture". Glass' new collection of paintings is a continuation of the artist's earlier project where he questions his own identity through fragments of memory by autobiographical discourse. Each of Ari Glass’ paintings looks as a seemingly unrelated sequence from the painter’s life and a reflection of certain emotions, but behind each experience lies the entire amalgam of various thoughts, feelings, and ideas that tie all the pieces.

Because postmodernism doesn’t deal with extensive narration, as through flashback, the Ari Glass explores the layers of his personality through introspection and self-awareness. His paintings are in fact a reflection of his era, both artistic and personal, with which he is trying to position himself in the modern art scene.

His paintings are personally and subjectively saturated with his own symbols and atrocities, but they are both universal and easily readable. The lonely figures of the autobiographical character often painted in a way that’s stylized, reduced and comic, placed in abstract, undefined metaphysical space, actually represent the search for the meaning of man's existence. Their isolated position clearly points to alienation as the greatest disease of modern society.

The existentialist charge in the paintings is warmed by the optimistic coloration, a messy layer, and a few witty verbal messages. The words are written in English, and the structure of the canvas reflects the painting current mood, although as Ari Glass showed in his portfolio, it often had nothing to do with the meaning of the work itself. These inscriptions are like neon advertisements that unconsciously produce artificial desires, or as an enigma that indicates just how complex we are, which is why we act irrationally and randomly. The exhibition "Beyond the Mental Picture" will be opened for showing open until August 15th.

Ari Glass is a Seattle born painter and designer. His work reveals a lot of personal narratives which are inspired by historical and fictional concepts. Most of his paintings deal concepts such as sovereignty and independence, although his primary intention is to showcase the deep, personal and positive effect that art and art history left on him. Ari Glass grew up in the Rainier Valley district of Seattle, and in 2015 received GAP funding to help produce his debut solo exhibition: "The Sun is Made of Gold". The artist had it envisioned as an immersive gallery environment involving paintings, video projections, vitrine installations and custom framing that place the viewer in a different dimension.