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Art’s power to move us has been expressed in geographical terms, “transporting” us to depicted worlds. Art can also move us psychically, charging our awareness with an urgency that moves us from one level of consciousness to the next. This process has been described as disturbing and disorienting, as if the compass of our emotions has been drawn powerfully from its proscribed circuit, left pointing to terra incognito.
Raffi Tokatlian is an artist who has touched art’s ancient power to interrupt the everyday and open portals to unknown. He does this by creating sculptural figures that are at once surreal and allegorical, yet full of human feeling. While hewing close to the forms of nature, the work risks distortion and transgression. The artist is willing to shake us up, intent on awakening us to see something both strange and real.
Running through Tokatlian’s work is the sense of transformation: chimeras arise with the merging of the human and the animal; bodies expand, contract, or deteriorate; limbs morph into multiple extensions. The key to these transformations is the energy that animates all the figures, expressing itself physically, in dance-like movements, and emotionally, in the metamorphoses they undergo.
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