Fioland 2009

Arsen Savadov's *Fioland* is a wild party on canvas, like a Hieronymus Bosch painting got crashed by a record store and a beach vacation. I imagine Savadov diving in, mixing up figures and objects with a kind of playful abandon, not afraid to let things get a little weird. The textures in this painting are so alive, from the smooth skin of the sunbathers to the rough edges of the floating records and the skeletal structures that seem to pop out from the background. Everything feels layered, like Savadov kept adding and subtracting, building up this strange world bit by bit. Look at the way he renders the bodies, some are carefully detailed, others are almost abstract. I imagine Savadov was thinking about history painting, and also pop culture, maybe even just trying to capture the chaos of life itself. It reminds me a little of Sigmar Polke, or even some of the early collage work of Robert Rauschenberg, this constant push and pull between representation and abstraction. For me, *Fioland* is a reminder that painting is a way of thinking, a way of making sense, or maybe nonsense, out of the world around us.