Metamorphosis of an American Artist
By Jo Nelsen

The Past

Kaloust Guedel remembers the moment art entered his life and transformed him forever. He was a teenager in Lebanon at the time of the civil war when it was dangerous even to go outdoors. He received a book of poetry as a gift. “It made me so happy,” he said, “I ended up reading it 200 times.” It was then he decided to paint. There were brushes and paints available because his father had once been a painter. “I bought the missing colors from the paintbox, and that was the beginning of my painting journey.”

And Guedel  is grateful for every experience – even the hardship. During his formative years in Lebanon, after leaving the Soviet Union, he came face to face with military interrogation. With machine guns aimed at his head, he didn’t know if he would live or die. “These are experiences that influenced my thinking,” Guedel  says. “But I learned how the world runs.”

Since then Kaloust Guedel  has used his knowledge in a painterly way. “Instead of painting beautiful flowers, I decided to make statements exposing what humans are capable of doing,” he explains. Art is his passion, and his creative output has evolved from subjects of oppression, bondage and war to his present focus where he says, “I see beauty in everything.”

The Present

In his most recent collection, “Elements of Manipulation,” Guedel  often combines ready-made text from newspapers with thickly applied paint in candy colors. Orange, red and lime entice the eye where, upon closer examination, words of grave import are obscured by color and cutouts of seductive women and other shapes. His execution is direct, and the result is energetic collage, fragments of a puzzle – not unlike the appearance of a heavily redacted document which leaves the viewer to fill in the blanks.

“I feel a responsibility,” he says, “to make the viewer aware of something that has not been expressed in visual art – how easily our sources of information can be manipulated because advertisers, political campaigns, governmental institutions and media outlets employ strategies to direct public opinion to their advantage often without consideration of facts.” Committed to social commentary, the way in which Guedel  uses color imposed upon black and white, diverts attention and creates a cover-up in the same way information that reaches us every day is already colored by the messenger.

The Future

Elisabeth Sussman, Curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 2011, picked one of Guedel ’s paintings for an exhibition she was curating in New York. Charlie Manzo, Director of Gagosian Gallery NY, selected two of Guedel ’s works for LA Art Association's Signature Survey Exhibition of The Very Best Emerging Artists. Guedel  has been included in New American Paintings, and his composition “Kisses from the Dark Side of Mars” was chosen for the cover of the 15th Anniversary Edition. A host of galleries in Los Angeles have exhibited his work as well as New York, Chicago, Yerevan, Beijing and Seoul. Amongst exhibitions he has curated, outstanding are: “Man's Inhumanity to Man: Journey Out of Darkness” for Brand Library Art Galleries, and “From Ararat to America – Armenian Contemporary Artists” for Forest Lawn Museums, both with exhibition catalogues.

Today Guedel  explores the aesthetics of history-making and the authenticity of reportage using abstract collage with mixed media, and he devotes significant study to psychology and philosophy. “I don’t know where it is going to go from here,” he admits. But wherever Guedel ’s imagination takes him it will be a powerful comment on our world. Kaloust Guedel  is a prophet, an authentic voice that uses art to call our attention to the confusion coming at us day to day. For many years Guedel  saw color as superficial, appealing to the emotions rather than the intellect, and he avoided it. “But now I want to come out of the seriousness of black and white,” he says. “Why don’t we smile once in a while too?”