Material World by Ariel Lavian

Artist list

Ariel Lavian

Ariel Lavian sees beauty wherever he may go. He collects objects he happens to find, whenever he recognizes the material’s potential -- be it a wandering plastic bag, metal pipes, a crumbling tree trunk -- and brings them to his studio where he turns them into jewelry. The workshop and his yard serve as an experimental laboratory where he uses chemical compounds to transform his metals, soaking them in this chemical bath - often for several months.
Beyond creating a merely decorative object, Lavian uses his highly personal material language for this process, enabling him as an artist-researcher to raise a dialogue regarding ideas and concepts close to his heart.
The pieces in the exhibition are taken from eight separate series developed by the artist over the past two years. The motifs that emerge from the series interconnect, and together they create an entirety. They are organized in clusters marked by an internal grammar that leans on material compositions, sometimes polarized, sometimes complementary. The spectator experiences them as a journey through an imaginary universe created in a difficult-to-decipher era. The forms and shapes that emerge appear at once familiar and alien, mysterious, speculative, stimulating to the senses. The worlds he generates raise questions about the range between the natural and the artificial, preservation and disintegration, the arbitrary and the intentional, life in the present and that of the future.
Using small-scale objects, Lavian succeeds in communicating a vigorous and thought-provoking scope of ideas and feelings. He knowingly chooses to create jewelry that will not necessarily stand the test of time, with the ephemeral awareness that in the world of the infinite matter he inhabits, life continues on beyond itself.