Among modern Armenian artists Gevorg Yeghiazaryan is famous for his unique figurative thinking. The violinist performing a tender piano in a dreamlike melancholy is a singular poetic symbol of his art. The inseparable characters of the player and violin join in a magic image, take the viewer to a dream-world of Oriental-Persian bliss where feelings are refined of worldly vanity. What is the meaning of this hidden, dim and mysterious symbol? Is it merely a romantic device? But this would be simplifying the artist?s world conception.
The painter hardly stands the onslaught of energy released from every character emerging on the canvas. Some secrete forces seem to lead the brush of the painter prompting him the temper of the new personages. They multiply but preserve some inner kinship. At first sight we deal with an unimaginable blend of affinities, influences, associations and styles. The artist however succeeds in presenting this blend as rare and natural.
Gevorg Yeghiazaryan has already worked out his own style on condition we understand it as a system of definite formal features. The roundish, heavy arms, legs and shoulders, the fine grandeur of hands and feet convey the characters some animal flexibility which is both chaste and sensual. The painter creates personages with an obvious retrospection to classic forms, but his willful treatment of the human body is amazing: he deforms it, twists the joints or screens them with drapery. At the same time, Yeghiazaryan makes the bizarre transformation of lines and their logic accessible to us.
Through heavy forms of the flesh one perceives the thick blend of mythological, antic-classic, modern and iconographic elements. His paintings have some affinity with the unreal dim shades and the appeasing melody of fresco-painting. Very often the artist returns to the same topic seeing every time that the object is unattainable. And this pursuit seems to have no end.
Marina Stepanyan
Art critic, Yerevan
Silence and solitude |
