The Armenian artist Armen Eloyan’s life story is unusual. In 1983, aged seventeen and involved in punk culture, he went to work in the studio of the esteemed Armenian animator, Robert Sahakian. A year later, Eloyan enrolled as a cook in the Russian army, where violence, frugality and food became part of his daily experience. In 1991, when Armenia won its independence from the Soviet Union, Eloyan left. He settled in Holland, where he ended up studying at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, where Luc Tuymans was his professor for a time, and encouraged him to come to Antwerp, where he is now showing works at Tim Van Laere Gallery—paintings that present a topsy-turvy world of cartoonish figures, à la Guston, a funny kind of dystopia.
