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A native of New York, Paul Tamanian has lived
in Tallahassee, Florida since receiving his degree in interior design
from Florida State University. Longing for more tactile involvement in
the arts, he became– not surprisingly– a self taught, highly
innovated ceramist, selected for inclusion in dozens of solo and group
exhibitions. Relentlessly forging new ground, Tamanian next
turned his remarkable talents to his present medium– aluminum. He has
gone on to exhibit and sell works in many prestigious galleries across
the United States. In the past five years, Tamanian has exhibited
with such notables as William Morris, Jim Dine, Richard Jolly and Jun
Kaneko. His work has been commissioned and acquired by noted private and
corporate collectors in the United States and abroad. Artists teach themselves– and none, with
more focus and dedication than Paul Tamanian. Beginning as a ceramist,
he first created asymmetrical pots with soft, sloping shoulders and off
centered voids, followed by elongated amphorae, often with sharply
pointed bases. With clay, his surfaces were widely varied, from delicate
textures and muted coloration to highly charged abstract and geometric
designs. Never one to stop moving and experimenting, occasionally
failing, nearly always succeeding, Tamanian moved from smooth and urbane
finishes in clay to rough and direct ones, enjoying whatever bohemian
freedoms were available. So too with imagery; when he turned from
rounded female vessels to male ‘tusk’
form forms, he made allusions to sacred ritual items as well as
to antiquities , in essence creating instant artifacts by paraphrasing
fossils, zoomorphic artworks of other cultures, and even archaic
drinking cups of horn. Restless with the constraints of ceramics,
Tamanian sought, and found another medium in which to express his rare
talents– aluminum. He had the mechanisms for attenuated curves and for
transforming planes of metal into ‘canvases’. Unfettered by the
properties of clay, his metallic vessels could be pierced and stitched
with laces of cable, or their razor ridged welds could be polished down
to the raw material so that the seams stood in bright contrast to the
riot of color and texture on flat surfaces. Almost simultaneously, his
vessels opened out, evolving into sculpture and even into paintings on
sheet aluminum. This is not to say he abandoned his sophisticated
‘vessel’ forms. Rather, he continues to do everything at once. Having taken on the challenges of three
dimensional painting, Tamanian's fondness for all-over patterning
recalls both the splattered color of abstract expressionism and the
reductive stages of print-making. As labor-intensive as is this system
of building, shaping, painting and abrading, it is the visual poetry of
his surfaces that carry a distinctly contemporary flavor. Twenty first
century viewers respond to microcosmic saturated colors like those found
in crystal or biomorphic cells. They also respond to macrocosmic
imageries like the cartography of distant planets. We have become
familiar with satellite view of glacial strata on heavenly bodies,
including our own earth. These phenomena are the sense of Tamanian’s
new imagery. Paul Tamanian is a new millennium artist in
the most adventurous mode. It will be exciting to see where he takes us
next. - Allys Palladino Craig Director, Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts
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