Aram’s paintings explore the potential for ornament and pattern to transcend the decorative. In these works,/// a pattern that has been built by repeating an isolated detail from a Persian carpet competes for dominance with a geometric pattern that one might associate with common European Modernist architecture. These paintings are made with a typically Modernist approach to painting: the artist works the entire canvas at once, building up and scraping down layers of paint, in search of a fleeting resolution. The paintings begin with a pencil grid, mapping out the floral forms, which are drawn in with oil crayons and then wiped away and redrawn, leaving evidence of the previous layers. The pencil grid emerges faintly to the surface, a nod to Agnes Martin, an artist that Aram has long admired. Like Martin, Aram is interested in an emotional or spiritual affect in his paintings, something that has frequently been deemed taboo in art criticism. Through the use of ornament and pattern, his paintings achieve a depth and presence beyond the so-called decorative, renegotiating a history of Modern art that has banished ornament as meaningless excess, a waste of labor, an architectural crime.