Kafe Smictiric revisits aim’s BANGD series

Iceman/aim

Revisiting aim’s explosive Bangd series, I am struck by the combination of mental force and physical energy that leaps away from the canvas, almost knocking the viewer to the other side of the gallery. His material gestures resonate with the structural shifts of organisms and planetary environments, even on a flat surface. aim navigates relations of volume and form at the point where the microscopic and the macroscopic overlap, intersect and simultaneously converge and diverge in a messy but beautiful way. “The Iceman” figure is for once absent but implied. The ‘Blocks’ are recognisable yet also encompass a near abstract vocabulary that  borrows from bodies and landscapes and cosmic elements  to discover indescribable matter in a revealed but idiosyncratic way. Aim makes a veritable STATEMENT  re plastic investigation of the formless, the misshapen and yet the provisionally concrete ie Block-provisional because it will ‘change’ beyond recognition. Intuitively concocted forms self-consume, self-produce and self-vivify, as if the ice is actually fertile-which it is ,to the extent  that it is frozen water,that can be released for the good of the earth. At once a continuous development of a shared idea and a space of tension , aim in painted form creates  hierarchies of perception that find themselves rearranged, much as the Block of ice got rearrnaged in the Iceman’s live performance work, which often left a picture of inspired debris. This debris is more focused, if debris can be focused, on the canvas. There is the  space between the  painting and the performer on stage. There is a sense of an experience that has already been  consumed by an audience but not fully digested. The results of melted Blocks are depicted throughout his work, which obscure their intended object and act as obstacles to vision. By troubling perception, aim interrogates the ocular centrism of painting and the associated role of spectacle and access. Spectators yearn for the live experience which has now passed, throughout his work, obscuring their intended objects and acting as obstacles to vision. The tension of impermeability is mirrored in the sculptures whose surface fractures seem to chisel at opacity. At its heart is a denial of the void, resisting non-being and suggesting representation has its place. The viewer is psychologically involved in the former making process, provoking precarious pulsations of purity. The sense of the sublime is never far from aim’s work, even though the biological universality of the human race is implicit. Decision-making is strong in contrast to the hesitation underlining the precise painting dilemma. There is an oblique fascination, which rejects both art object and intentional object-hood.

Kafé Smictiric [art critic]