About New Locality project
by Petja Grafenauer

David Kareyans painting series bears the title New Locality (2009). It is a large cycle in which the Armenian artist, after years of working in new media, makes a deliberate return to the medium of painting. In his environment, painting is today viewed as a traditional, commercial, and undesirable medium; an artist who works in painting is hardly playing it safe. To choose painting is to rebel against the ideological consensus of the local art world. But this is merely an external frame for our understanding of painting in a concrete space and time. The paintings themselves transcend it, although they do not entirely renounce it.

In Kareyan’s works nature is joined with technology, biology with culture, and beauty with terror before the atrocities of our time. Although artist’s avoids any direct politicization, this is precisely what makes these works even more political, than many of the socio-critical videos coming out of Armenia. The artist's conviction that each of the objects, each of the elements residing in the paintings is autonomous, that they are of no use to anyone but merely exist, resists the capitalist logic of utilitarian value. His paintings are not created to satisfy some need for politicization, which is what the Western art wants. They do not seek to fill a void. They are here because they want to say something about the common story of human beings trying to survive under the pressures of an imposed system. One of Kareyan's paintings is titled Incomplete as Usual. One painting cannot say everything. It is incomplete, but even so, it intuitively unites, on its hexagonal canvas, the universe of our contemporary age into a single whole.