Untitled (Mapleton)

Paul Sarkisian’s wall-sized painting shows the facade of an abandoned wooden house in which the artist had lived for some months. It is the third and arguably the most radical in a series of houses depicted in a monochrome and lead-like grey and applied to the canvas by means of a spray gun. The viewer is confronted with the vast front of a log cabin that fills the entire frame of the picture. The narrow porch, the door, the walls and the windows are cluttered with all sorts of household goods placed next to, below, and above each other. All the objects are rendered in unbelievably meticulous detail. Taken together, they form a tight, suggestive structure. The horizontal axis extends beyond the periphery of the viewer’s field of sight. In order to achieve that degree of reality desired by Sarkisian, up to a hundred photographs can enter into the creative process in addition to the original photographic documentation. Image and reality should become as one, Sarkisian postulates. He has said: “When I start to paint an object, I paint as long as I still see the painting. When the picture is completed and on an equal footing with myself, the painting aspect vanishes. It is no painting anymore, it is reality. The painting is completed in its disappearance.”