Anna Kostanian: She Vibrates

 KOSTANIAN: ENERGY AS ART 

Let’s embark with Anna Kostanian to the center of the galaxy, to the reflection of the cosmos in a drop of water, to the sun inside its rays, to the center of gravity. The artist’s signature form is the primal understanding of energy released to all points outward simultaneously. Anna Kostanian releases, explodes and envelops. She embodies energy and her art manifests it, delivers it and, most importantly, records it.

The recent paintings by Anna Kostanian continue with her career-long embrace of the primitive, the emotive, the raw and untamed. And yet, even with the liberated rhythm apparent in each work, there is an unyielding order, a ripple through both time and space, a precise substructure that guides the artist’s brute brushwork.

When her paintings are composed in her assertive dark chroma we see themes and feelings rendered before us. But in choosing white paint in some of this work, the painter embraces the act of reduction. These white tones, this absence of color, this consideration of invisibility… it all conspires to construct an additional paradigm. She enters bold pictorial territory in the paradoxical absence of assertive delineation – the absence of color adds the ethereal to the possibilities of what is going on here.

White paint is, in the history of painting, the additive to create softer colors, the mix to brighten, the dabble of reflected light. In the tradition of the rigorous modernist Robert Ryman and with the bold minimal freedom of the painter Agnes Martin, Kostanian rids her paintings of anything but themselves. Abandoning color emphasizes the presence of paint, of the artist’s intent to create rather than render, to play god (or more appropriately, goddess) and fabricate a new universe instead of subordinating wonder and awe to something prefabricated.

This exhibit highlights a broad swath of the artist’s oeuvre, from the compact to the monumental, from documentation of the temporary to the portable and permanent. Wherever paint is composed, energy abounds and this artist belabors that unyielding fact to wonderous results.

—Mat Gleason, 2024