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The art of Hany Armanious is one based on appearance, where semblance can assume any shape or form. Deceptive by nature, the work is masked by its own 'image'. In such a spirit of play, it is neither interesting nor helpful to cite this particular work or that; better, instead, to dwell on why the artist adopts such a methodology. It is a unique act of artistic alchemy, one based on inclusion and capable of harmonising disparate sculptural elements transcending all reference points. Armanious manages to both reassure and surprise. It's a little like that rare sensation of 're-seeing' for the first time, when one feels caught between the projection of a specific memory and that of something new, when the familiar becomes destabilising. Mashing styles from a rigid minimalism to the sordid clamour of kitsch, a haunting carnivalesque drama is enacted. References are found, copied, simulated, serialised, repaired, invented; classical allusions superimposed by those of pop. An extraordinary freedom is exercised as the artist moves swiftly and confidently to the apparent antithesis of what came before ...

If art history may be represented by a schematised tree, with the founding avant-gardists and their followers forming their own offshoots of influence, there are currently as many branches as there are artists. With multiple stylistic forms intersecting and mutating so quickly, it's impossible for one form to assume dominance over another. Armanious works in this state of ambiguity. He doesn't detach himself from reality, but rather metamorphoses through materiality (but not form). This victory of the imaginary over the real makes one think of the free-associative thinking of French poet Comte de Lautreamont ('beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella!'), the compulsive beauty expressed by Andre Breton, and even the worlds of Hieronymus Bosch. But it's a mocking revolt and Armanious uses all sorts of distancing tools - clownish parody, sarcastic irony - in order to negate himself, inviting us to laugh along with him. He is the adolescent who 'gets even' with a century of misery. In this game everything is permitted: ardent fervour, joyful ferocity, knowing metamorphosis. It is a great act of mimesis in which the actor recites several parts, evoking different phantoms at the same time ...

Armanious explores these themes in Template, a work presented in the 2010 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. In this installation, a metre-long temple perches atop two polystyrene ladders in a space strewn with terracotta mud. Sitting nearby appear to be the white marble feet of a goddess statue - in fact shoes made of foam which visitors are encouraged to wear and wipe clean on a rubber doormat. Once dried out, the mud will make a series of building blocks which fit together to form thirty-six columns, two pediments and walls. The piece is a revisiting of sorts of the artist's 2007 work, Year of the pig sty, which enacts a similarly muddy ritual beginning with a pair of casted Crocs shoes ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Autumn 2010 issue.