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Rating: I met Armand two years ago at an exhibition in Venice, and he immediately and reciprocally inspired a sense of warmth in me. Of Peruvian origin but residing in Germany for a lifetime, Armand is an eclectic artist, and the techniques he uses to express himself lead him towards a fusion, which I could define as "spatial," of European and American painting. What immediately struck me about the various installations hosted by the exhibition were his monochromatic paintings with the most nonexistent color there is, black. This color in art is a non-color, because even shadows are colored - just think of our reflection on a floor or in a mirror - and its opposite, white, is nothing more than the sum of all colors. In painting techniques, black and white are also called "dead colors" because, with their cold tone, they generally serve as a base in painting preparation. Using black uniformly on canvas denotes courage or the search for a particular expressive language.
The black canvases exhibited in Venice I called Armand's Black Stars.
Like Yves Klein, in Armand there is a continuous oscillation from an objective and physical plane to a spiritual one. When he arrives at monochrome painting, his artistic experience is already well-formed. With the works displayed in Venice, the artist intertwines, with a critical attitude towards the industrial civilization clearly influenced by Dada and American New Dada, a Latin American and spiritualist heritage with oriental reminiscences; in fact, in works like Black Stars (le stelle nere), the pigment created by the black color - tone on tone - recalls the marks in the sand and the long grooves on the gravel of the Japanese zen garden, and just as in this particular symbolic space of the oriental garden the flow of water is represented by long parallel lines that move sinuously, so, in Armand's canvases, the color flows and wedges or clogs like a stream's water among the rocks. However, while in the Japanese garden it is possible to modify the arrangement and marks on the sand every day to prepare for introspection and meditation on man and nature, in the black-on-black marks of his canvases everything is petrified, and made material within the canvas fragment: an infinite space that makes penetrating it distressing, exactly the opposite of what happens within a zen garden.
In front of Armand's monochrome works, one can also remain outside, along the demarcation line that the artist offers us by using certain ancient frames chosen by him that create a "historical enclosure" on which to lean, on which to meditate, leaving that sense of infinite and profound void as if it were a black star, a schwarzer Stern, to remind us of absence, the end, death.
In some monochrome works, Armand leaves an opening, small points or lines of light, or a small fragment of something, that pierce through the glossy, enamel black of his extraordinary Black Stars where the black with ultramarine has the color of tropical nights, but with Prussian blue acquires the chill of glaciers.
Armand's Black Stars behave like in the hypothetical formation of a black star by gravitational collapse, with an internal consistency rich in dense matter. Thus, in the quadrangular or square shapes, a quantity of enamelled and brilliant black pigment coagulates, or dense and opaque, reminiscent of paradoxical celestial bodies. Just as the Black Stars transport information and radiation within them, Armand's black canvases emit rays and centripetal force that absorb every light inward, enveloping and concentrating every sense of space and all our sensory perceptions in an "event horizon," similar to that of a Black Hole where, as with the earth's horizon, the more you walk to get closer, the more it moves away.
Armand is therefore a keen observer of how the fusion of such distant civilizations can function; he, a Peruvian European, a citizen and traveler of the world, in his latest works, the extraordinary monochromatic Black Stars exhibited in Venice, will now prefer interstellar journeys.
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