The work of Ari Erom appears as a woman in backlighting, she seems impassively joyful.
We grasp, inflection after inflection, the micro-displacements of her nebulous presence, a very living form that stands out against a background surface pierced by luminous colored flashes: gradations and nuances of blue, gray, mauve and yellow... and then suddenly the abstraction becomes tamed beneath the features.
Everything begins with Ari Erom with the irrepressible need to paint. To paint as one "breathes," in the pleasure and voracious desire of the gesture that transgresses the expressive power of painting opposed to illusionistic deceptions. With obstinacy, Ari Erom says only one thing: "I paint."
What surrounds him, the everyday, his contemporaries, landscapes and cities as well as imaginary spaces, history and revisited myths (the "Pinocchia," his bronze sculpture). He enriches himself with the unexpected, with the fortuitous chances of creation that he diverts, welcomes before joining them.
Ari Erom expects all this from painting, because he starts from the postulate of an art founded on creative freedom. He tells stories with images, convinced that retinal pleasure alone is exhausted in the figured world that passes through it and emerges from it, enriched by the forces of his style. Notice these bubbling pleasures like an invisible sap well hidden in the hollow of a smile. They are always present, irritating in the indecisive interstices.
The work born from Ari Erom's imagination, in sculpture as in painting, transports us into a world that opens onto a gourmand sidestep to plunge us into a universe with surrealist and burlesque tints. A world vaster, higher, more Promethean than a simple reflection of reality, a world within which there is talk of joy, sensuality, elegance, which escapes us as much as it magnetizes us.
Indeed, Ari Erom's language expresses itself entirely from the beginning that he transmutes, in the secret of his studio, drawing and colors, materials and light, into a carnal enchantment.
Ari Erom surpasses the frameworks of virtuosity to compose a pictorial and sculptural performance of incredible force. It is his entire being that he engages before us. His whole presence as a man. We follow his brush that asserts itself, that bursts, that suddenly weakens, that cries out again, before returning to a form of languor, of joyful melancholy through glides, through jerks, sometimes through ruptures.
See the clay of his sculptures that vibrates, that bars space, that launches itself like a diver to cross through light in repeated movements and positions that never freeze. Ari Erom gives us to see and to feel, behind the images, behind the seizures that his entire work brings to birth, an art of the visible and of the re-enchantment of the world.
This is called irreverence, insolence, effrontery, audacity, non-conformism, an electron that moves the lines, that cuts skylights in walls until the windows are wide enough for the spirit. Impertinence will never have been so pertinent.
Moreover... others also call this freedom. There is something of the order of enigma in this artist of silences, of solitude and contemplation too, which testifies to the artist's capacity to restore the entire palette of human feelings. In sum, we are in the presence of a violently optimistic artist as much through the character of his figures, their attitudes, the tender and mischievous quality of their gaze as through his color where a tonality of human nature dominates in which bright reds and clear yellows burst forth with strange sonorities.
The broad precision of his drawing, his skill as a colorist are in service of a hope that is found in all his canvases. This whirlwind of finery, lights and dancing colors exalts, in double measure, the unbridled sensuality and melancholy of a world where Woman represents survival. Through her, animating the saraband of derisory masks, the posterity of other madmen is assured. That of men in a hurry.
