Tigran Malkhasyan | Personal site

Tigran Malkhasyan believes and tries to convince others, that art is subject to the same immutable laws as everything else in the natural world. These laws, complex and elusive, and insufficiently researched, are not yet within the bounds of serious science. Thus, in his opinion, historically, the study and interpretation of art falls on the shoulders of the artist himself, subject therefore to, at best, bias, and at worst, charlatans.

He is also convinced that the brain itself contains the process of evolution; certain mechanisms that respond to certain stimuli and in turn cause certain – if not thoughts, then emotions and associations. This concept has yet to be thoroughly explored, and it is up to the artist, ahead of scientists, to intuitively find the signals required to evoke in the viewer’s mind the desired answers. The better the artist himself feels these signals, the faster he will find the path to the database of the viewer’s mind; the more information it conveys, the more vivid the emotions it elicits. And there can be no doubt about the brightness of emotions, they have after all overcome millions of years of natural selection, of survival, the hunter, the hunted, life, and death. And this is what Tigran Malkhasyan implements with rare tenacity: drops of red excite the viewer, signalling pain, danger, death, but also, food, warmth, and victory.

Yet he consistently removes himself from the creative process, he sends no personal message, nor does he express his own emotions; he pours paint and allows natural forces to act: centripetal and centrifugal, gravity, surface tension, diffusion, and repulsion. At first glance, his works represent traditional abstraction: spots, blots, drips. However, these are not as chaotic as they might initially seem. He introduces pattern, not with the usual artistic tools, the brush or palette knife, but by allowing the paint to flow freely, and through the use of robots to rotate the canvas: in different directions, at different speeds, in changing rhythms. Paints drip, crush and merge, branch and writhe; spreading streams form similarities to fractals. Like the creation of the world itself when lava flowed, waves rolled, precipitation fell, stalactites formed, whirlpools spun, and protoplasm collected into a slimy mass. For Malkhasyan, an admirer of the great mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, these pictorial analogues of natural fractals are very important. Within these drips, stains and swirls, lie the structure of crystals, the traces left by a wave on the sand, the stalactites that once filled the space of a cave, the shoots of primitive plants, formations of clouds, fragments of shell and skeleton, clusters of cells, the tangle of blood vessels.

In essence, Tigran imitates the process of creation, and with the curiosity of the creator, he asks, “will it work out well?” His canvases are a kind of alchemist’s cauldron; reagents are laid down on a whim, over which he conjures by trial and error – in the hope of turning dust and ash into untarnishable gold.

Marina Koldobskaya

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