Like ‘abstract versions of the original’, his paintings, drawings and sculptures revive and revisit familiar figures, taken from globalised popular culture and both individual and collective memory: mickey mouse, donald duck, Wile e. coyote and other cartoon and amination icons resurface as grotesque figures of dubious and disputable morals, projected in devilish scenes where (often masturbatory) sex and violence rule, and in which man’s perverse, animal side is sketched in innuendo, present in and among these anthropomorphic creatures. Human and non-human, tragedy and comedy, fairyland and dystopia meet and mingle, forming the spark of explosive, ambiguous, twisted, befuddled tales, that seem to engage in a secret dialogue with certain dark (and sometimes buried) episodes of History, riddled with fresh- ly-smarting scars and still open wounds. accentuated by the recurring motif of duality – whether in the combination of two paintings that make up a single whole or in the number of figures that are depicted there — the dramatic tension that armen eloyan generates and establishes goes hand in hand with the sparseness and garbled legibility of the text. drawing on the aesthetics of both street art and comic strips, the writing undergoes a doubly ‘performative’ movement, as if secretly running on batcave energy. it is a matter of making the image speak as much as of making the image via textual matter, according to a resolutely expressive but intentionally cryptic and interferential logic, deliberate in its non-communication.