Modern Hieroglyphics: Jamel Armand's "Rooted"
Jamel Armand’s mural, Rooted, is a part of Eritage’s exhibition States of Play: Part II.
by Alexander Picoult
On June 9th, 2024, Jamel Armand visited Eritage Art Projects to transform the space in a single day. In preparation for the opening of States of Play: Part II, Armand was asked to create a floor-to-ceiling mural in his signature hieroglyphic style.
All photographs by Matilde Fieschi
The work itself only took about ninety minutes to complete. Fueled by the music enveloping the room, Armand created an inspired masterpiece without any planning. With just a foam roller and a tray of black paint, the wall began to come to life in minutes. Armand identifies with a condition called synesthesia, where certain senses are entangled due to crossovers in brain pathways. For Armand, music influences his geometries and visual perception. For this reason, for the entire ninety minutes, jazz music and ambient noise was flowing through the space, and he rarely broke from concentration.
Armand attributes his symbolic style directly to his Indonesian heritage. His work includes a series of slightly varied yet repeated motifs reminiscent of early cave drawings and hieroglyphs. In this iteration, Armand has included fourteen skulls, fourteen faces, ten hands, six snakes, three chickens, one eye, one alligator, and one llama-wolf hybrid.
There are two main reasons that Armand’s mural fits so well with the philosophy of States of Play.
First, the mural’s apparent harmony as a result of carefree randomness. As I stated before, Armand did not plan the layout of the mural in advance of his trip to Portugal aside from wall placement and size. Instead, Armand seemed to enter a trance, and the composition was influenced by real-time factors. This can be distinctly classified as a form of ‘play’ itself. To experiment freely without the constraints of restriction on composition, color and form is to play. When art becomes calculated, planned, and academic, all sense of play is lost and the process instead becomes a task.
Second, the return to simplicity that a language of symbols requires. By referencing a symbolic Indonesian language created hundreds of years ago, Armand is forcing us to return to the true definition of art: the purest form of visual expression created by a human and a tool. The mural transforms Eritage into a cave of its own, reminding the viewer of the earliest way of creating art and existing as a playful being.
As framed fittingly by co-curator David Shillinglaw: Playing is story telling too; imagining and exaggerating, early man scratching bison on the wall and slapping muddy hand prints to decorate a cave, making a home and sharing stories with your tribe.
We invite you to explore Armand’s work, as well as the seven other artists contributing to States of Play: Part II, opening on June 26th, 2024 at Eritage Art Projects.