Joseph Aphram posing in front of one of his paintings at the Art District gallery. (Credit: Courtesy of the artist)
As an interior architect and set designer, including work on theater stages and television sets, Joseph Aphram may seem solely concerned with the obvious: ontological reductionism and surface-level aesthetics.
However, the 30-something is deeply drawn to introspection and psychology. Curious about what inhabits people — emotions, feelings and other movements of the soul — he enjoys exploring their “driving forces,” as he says, through reading and painting.
It is an art he practices in his spare hours, between scenography and architectural projects, in a quest for meaning and an intimate truth buried beneath the body's surface.
With acrylic highlighted in India ink, Aphram delves into the deep layers of the human being using an artistic language firmly grounded in the principles of architecture: rigorous composition, mastery of volume and dialogue between form and space.
Marked by rigorous academic training, he has developed a body of work with an intentional dramatic charge, dominated entirely by black-and-white and the human silhouette.
Through bodies sometimes depicted curled in a fetal state or in pain, other times powerfully emerging from a cosmic void, or blending with urban landscapes, Aphram stages various inner and energetic states that symbolize anxiety, confrontation, civility, triumph, trauma or resilience.
His compositions, with their complex lines, interlocking shapes and dense visual constructions, reveal the complexity of people and situations.
Streaked with white veins like waves of light, his dark works seem to probe the driving force — sometimes obscure — of emotions, that inner energy as elusive and difficult to decipher as it is meaningful and revealing of the unspeakable.
*“Driving Forces” by Joseph Aphram. Until Feb. 28 at Art District gallery, Gouraud Street, Gemmayzeh.
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