'Form & feathers' showcases Koukjian's most avantgarde

works to date. The exhibition will feature 9 bright

and compelling works by the acclaimed artist; 6 large bold mixed media canvases and 3 unique sculptural

works.

Pierre's artistic voice has elements of kitschypop

expressed with satire, humor and fun.The viewer is

presented with portraits, skulls wearing crowns and figures constructed in non traditional mediums such

as natural feathereach

individually color dyed, crystals, sequence, beads and pearls . The sculptures

exhibited are all uniqueeach

rendered by hand in stainless steel or fiberglass.

Two words come to mind when considering the materiality of Pierre Koukjian’s satirical kitsch: Living death. His

brazen use of plucked material and sculpted fetishism makes the viewer rethink the relationship with the familiar.

From the ironic title of " Fly Queen,” to his satire on the cult of celebrity, to the sensual and sexual play of his

smooth steely blending of the feminine, fruity, and earthly, “Form and Feathers” (2016) asks what has been

extracted for artistic expression.

The Queen, that global icon of weathered duration, is uncannily portrayed. Pierre Koukjian’s style repositions her not

as a joke but as an imperious subject of consideration. While the majestic queen she succeeded in years on the

throne was seen as unquestioned, always in solid colors of confidence, Koukjian’s painting has shown Queen

Elizabeth II as leaning toward the human. Her face is in monochromatic gray; her furs of an almost indistinguishable

white. The Queen is not the cult of celebrity; her feathered plumage is anything but furcaped.

Her figure is

susceptible to question. She has the withered look of a Rembrandt without the pity. She is a symbol of imperial

scepter. Still, her force is there, displayed in her striking crown, blinged with materials representative of pearls,

rubies and diamonds.

The painting “Gada” looks as if she is reaching for the eroticism of St. Teresa of Avilla. Koukjian’s touch is not

afraid of the standards he reinvokes.

The plumed majesty of female Arabian lyricists—Fairouz or Sabah—is caked

over in profane maquillage. Even the lyrical, sacred, depths of Oum Kalthum’s eddied waves of nostalgia have been

redirected in an erect militant French beret with a secret service outlook. But, it is not just one cultural overwriting

Koukjian invokes in his critique of the cult of celebrity. It is also his inverting of the carnivalesque. The death mask

used to bring communities together. It not only has brought children and adults to an embrace with the present spirit

of the past, it also acted as a lever to question sovereignty. Now, it leans more to the macabre Halloween and

Friday the Thirteenth commodity fetish. Koukjian’s work asks how art can critique the move from the cemetery

—Maqbara—to the macabre. What has happened to how one thinks of death?!

If the critique of the cult of celebrity was not livening enough in artistic reconvening, then certainly Koukjian’s

sculpted curvature is. His contoured form reminds us how the craft of sculpting can at once be smooth and

ambiguous, can realign us with the sensuality of the earthy and the overly sexual feminine persona, never forgetting

the animality between. We see the sailing elegance of the swan with an open nape exposing the secret between.

One sees sprouts recycled in circular fancy. In “Grave to New York” (1971), Adonis’ speaker said the pear was the

shape of the feminine produced by geometric design. Koukjian lives the sensual and sexual interplay of such

machinated play.

Lynda Aboukhater

Curator August 2016