aim
What can one say about aim’s latest “AIM” painting? It’s almost sculptural. The simplicity and strength and poise of the rocklike structures of the Blocks balancing on the top of the three letters belies the complex meanings behind the buckets at the bottom. Why is one Block stuck in the vertical of the ‘M’ letter? Does it represent fallen man or the commitment of The Iceman’s work ethic in the process of melting Blocks, which means the Block continues to melt and has its own individual heightened receiver/bucket.aim brings a loving intensity with often messy colours and oils struggling against the presence of fragmented blocks + the Iceman’s form. It’s beautifully bold and disquieting. aim’s recent works tread a path between figuration and abstraction that create surreal land/ice scapes, charged with symbolism and mysterious art-historical references. However, they evade a single interpretation, which makes his work even more interesting. You might call aim naif or primitive but sometimes he turns this apparent perception upside down and is positively sophisticated! Add the subaqueous qualities of the negative space peopled by Blocks which threaten to penetrate the substructure of critical thinking, and you have a challenging mix of conceptual questions. The consistency, composition, adaptability, colour, and texture of his paintings are offered to the viewer as entities that stimulate our perceptual system and change our actual temperatures..
aim investigates the construction of myth and ritual as a space where bodies/blocks of knowledge are able to accumulate and hybridise across time and place. Processes of zealous Block identification define both the logic by which aim structures content as well as a meticulous methodology of displaying ice blocks that have previously been melted [ref polaroids]. For his reiteration of the iceblocks , you might say every series is the same, but aim’s works take on hybrid identities and are juxtaposed with representations of The Iceman himself. This quasi human/mythical figure can be almost cartoon in style and execution but still can be emotionally moving, when one recognises The Iceman’s persistence in melting Blocks of ice is implicit in the composition.
The relationship between work and life and play, as well as the individual in relation to greater social systems and ecological changes, constitute the central focused inquiry of aim’s work. His fridge installation “Ice without the man” is based on the search for ultra reality. aim has researched related archival material, which he has integrated into an almost sonic installation as the noise of the fridge’s functioning is amplified in an abstracted and altered form to the background of repetitive reprises from the song of “I Can’t Realise You Love me”. [Kafe Smictiric-art critic]
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Iceman Block
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