About Artist

The Art of Life

Tigran Asatryan managed to get a thorough art education even in the Soviet period, having gone through all possible stages from the club of the House of Pioneers to the Yerevan Academy of Artists, having mastered the traditions of realistic painting, its main pictorial and plastic values. Then came the time for a generation of individualists, where everyone decided for himself. And on the creative path of Tigran Asatryan, which began after, everything turned out to be not so simple. In his technique, he continued to develop, honed skills, detail processing. But like every artist, Tigran had faced with the problem of personal attitude and response to new life conditions. He felt both incomprehensibility and confusion, which did not give way to unambiguous interpretation, but the new market-commercial side of the matter did not attract him. On his path of intellectual and moral searches, he was faced with the most powerful test, he survived clinical death. This fate made him look into its face through what he had experienced, which helped him discover wise joy through work, pain, overcoming fatigue. Tigran, in his own way, began to hear the discordance of the world of personal feelings. The time of emotional renaissance has come for the artist, it was more mature, intellectually enriched and colored with soft poetry. The present enveloping us in the course of the author’s emotional movements is filled with anxiety, sometimes melancholy and boredom, but is also permeated with sympathy and understanding, tender humbleness, kindness, simplicity and clarity. After all, banal truths contain a deep meaning. Here sits in front of us the «Old Cook», experienced, knowing the secrets of her difficult business. The «prodigal son» («The Way Home») hurries to reach his father’s house, hurries in the twilight, he has gone through a lot in his adventures and trials. He dreams of homemade scrambled eggs, warmth and comfort. And the «Wanderer» with his pitiful belongings, chilled, accompanied by a dog and a crow, wants simple affordable happiness, a natural life with its constant cycle of days and a change in the usual processes of work and rest... Here is a chicken trainer, in the dim light of the month, which suddenly calls to mind: «...And, rooster in pot, enter a fortune-teller’s yard. But white, white snow scalds my eyes till they smart.» (O. Mandelstam). We are captivated by the purity and simplicity of a peasant woman, where she, together with her pets, is fascinated by the music from the archaic gramophone... In these works, the viewer begins to be soak up with both sympathy and the author’s understanding, trying to move in the course of Tigran Asaturyane’s spiritual movements, and the viewer must guess a lot himself... And in any work we respond to the high cultural level of the artistic language. Each plot (episode of memories or painful sleep) turns into a miracle-making or thaumaturgies.

Marina Stepanyan

Art Critic

The border world between allusion and reality

The world of the artist Tigran Asatryan is open for each of us. At the same time, we are allowed to make a special journey in its very dense space, with the images and myths of the master, who envelops each of us with his unique energy of playing truth and fiction, with an elegant dose of theatrical irony and grotesque. People and animals, reality and mystery, sound and half-tones -this is that extraordinary, Asatryan’s symphony of color-sound, which with a piercing emotional force attracts us and we involuntarily become happy prisoners of this amazing world of mysteries and metaphors, where a very capacious truth of life shines through in each individual fragment and canvas. Borderline is the most acute, dangerous, but nagging territory in art. Tigran Asatryan creates and dwells freely there, between the otherworldly mystery and the truth of life. Thus, his painting undoubtedly has its own unique style, handwriting, meaning and genuine creative freedom of expression.

Vladimir Gabbe

Art Critic, Head of the Cultural Center of the Embassy of Armenia in Russia

Beyond the Horizon

A truly talented painter Tigran Asatryan has long held a special place in modern Armenian painting. His works, created with his subtle artistic flair and original compositions, have always attracted the viewer. The real and unreal, the lived and unlived collide in his paintings, and the clean and sincere inner world of the painter inadvertently opens up before us. It seems that there is nothing overwhelming for the art expert. He sets himself various complex tasks, but also finds interesting means and opportunities to solve them. What is important in this solution is a clear and underlying precise drawing, which is not a significant difficulty for the artist, because even during his years of study he was already distinguished by his diligence and a special love of painting. The mastery acquired as a result of all this perhaps became the main pillar of his painting. Among Asatryan’s works a large number are portraits, which almost all differ from the canons presented to us, pleasantly surprising us with the originality of the line of thinking and performance. Women’s portraits are particularly impressive, the images of which immediately penetrate and are irrevocably imprinted in the memory. The work «Grandmother from Tatev» is one of those portraits, in which the sad and anxious look depicted seems to speak to your soul. And you wonder how the old woman’s eyes, lowered from unseen pain, radiate kindness and the light of hope. The compositions form an integral part of Tigran’s painting. At first glance, these works, which stand out for their imaginative simplicity and are the result of the artist’s imaginative visions and fantasy, admire with high professionalism of their execution. In canvases created with free and casual, sometimes with sharp transitions of light and shadow, confident brushstrokes, experienced art connoisseurs may find a faint connection with works by Spanish and Flemish masters, but this minor influence in the artist’s unexplained interpretation conveys charm and mystery to compositions without a specific medium or period, which are: «Rooster Sellers,» «The Story of the Black Hen,» «Women with the Chameleon» and «The Town Governor.» Asatryan never has a creative crisis, and he does not go to the extremes, because he knows clearly what to do, which, perhaps, subconsciously directs him. Year after year we see Tigran reaching new heights, painting with his brush and creating new works, and now and then presenting pleasant surprises to art lovers.

Vardan Vardanyan

Art Critic