“Painter, sculptor, writer, musician, and for all we know dancer and magician, Vahe Berberian practices his multiple talents with respectful gravity and, at the same time, expressive abandon. Thus his paintings, which have been labeled “minimalist” because of their spare compositions and atmospheric voids, are filled, near to the brim, with gestures, notations, veritable diaries of thought and motion. Vahe invites us to decrypt his myriad markings, but the markings themselves defy translation: you either know right away what they say to you – and perhaps to no one else – or you puzzle eternally over their literal significance. Their formal significance, however, keeps you engaged, and you find interpretation, only to lose it again, then find another, then lose it, in a never-ending drift of meaning that very likely mimics the process by which Vahe reasoned these images into being to begin with. That’s why he paints – not only to say the things he needs to say, but to watch them float, expand, and metamorphose like clouds into things he never thought of saying. Our impulse is to call these paintings “hermetic,” closed in sense to all but their maker; but in fact we as much as Vahe are the determinants of their meaning. They are messages Vahe puts in bottles and sets on a psychic sea; they are saturated with the spirit’s brine.”

Peter Frank