Aram Saroyan’s Line Drawings Unify His Interdisciplinary Practice

American novelist, playwright, essayist and poet Aram Saroyan is celebrated for his one-word poems designed to defamiliarize language. Three of his poems adorn the walls of ‘Aram Saroyan: Writing with Colors’ at Francis Gallery, a spare yet rich show that intersperses his literary creations with his lesser-known, visual-art output. The exhibition begins by historicizing Saroyan’s practice. Displayed on either side of a central, curved wall are two watercolours on paper made in the summer of 1959, when the young writer, then living in Paris, encountered the work of Russian-born French abstract painter Serge Poliakoff. Evincing the influence of Poliakoff’s Taschisme, Untitled #1 (1959) is characterized by irregular dabs and splotches of colour in a panoply of hues: blue, red, yellow, green and grey. Because it was executed on thin paper – a writerly support – pen marks on the verso bleed through the page. On the opposite side of the wall is the more sensuous Untitled (1959), whose long, curvaceous strokes offer a welcome contrast to Untitled #1’s abrupt blotches of paint.

As a second-generation New York School poet, Saroyan was part of a literary milieu that espoused artistic cross-pollination by forming relationships or collaborating with visual artists in the city. Words & Photographs (1970) – one of several books by Saroyan displayed on a table in the gallery – combines his poems and photographs (informed by his training under Richard Avedon and Yasuhiro ‘Hiro’ Wakabayashi) in an apparent nod to the inextricability of his own work across disciplines. Alongside the publications is an archival binder containing Saroyan’s works on paper from the 1950s to the present day: ink abstractions scribbled on envelopes; paintings that read as studies in colour theory; playful doodles with humorous captions; even an oil-on-paper portrait of the artist painted by Alice Neel in 1964 in her Morningside Heights apartment.

Even more surprising, in light of its divergence from the rest of Saroyan’s oeuvre, is a trio of sandstone blocks (Untitled 14, 15 and 16, all 2024) engraved with a selection of his poems (for example, ‘silence silence’). The stones are the most sombre works in the show, their headstone-like quality evoking a sense of finality as they pay homage to Saroyan’s multidecade practice. Their awkward spacing on the wall echoes a critical aspect of his writing and drawing: as curator and writer Michael Ned Holte noted in a 2021 essay for Poetry magazine, Saroyan’s poems are ‘about the space between and around the words almost as much as the words themselves’, with space serving as ‘an essential dimension’ of the poems and drawings.

Located on the right side of the gallery, ten works on paper, made with oil-based markers, comprise the bulk of the exhibition. The colourful, minimalist drawings are part of a series of untitled works (all 2019) exhibited at Saroyan’s first solo exhibition at as-is.la gallery in 2020. Some drawings, such as Untitled 1, present abstracted figures; others, like Untitled 6, mimic landscapes or maps. The more dynamic Untitled 10 is the only work from the series to include text. (The word ‘SOLO’ can be found on the bottom left-hand side of the composition.) In their emphases on line and space, the drawings seem to visually translate Saroyan’s poetry of the 1960s, some of which appeared alongside conceptual art in publications such as Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer’s 0 to 9 (1967–69). Easily misinterpreted as childlike or naive, Saroyan’s contemporary drawings – the mature heirs to his looser Parisian works – are intentionally restrained and refreshingly unpretentious. As Holte described it, they appear to be the ‘late flowering of a lifelong exploration of line’.

‘Aram Saroyan: Writing with Colors’ is on view at Francis Gallery, Los Angeles until 31 August

^{Main image: Aram Saroyan, Untitled 16, 2024, Cumbrian sandstone, 33 × 38 × 7 cm. Courtesy: Francis Gallery; photograph: David William Baum}