Tigran Malkhasyan | Personal site

Modern artist and designer of Armenian origin. Currently lives and works in France. Born in Yerevan in the family of a St. Petersburg scientist and physicist. He studied at the Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute. 1985-1989 worked at the A.F. Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute, where he studied non-destructive optical testing methods and laser technology. He was one of the first in the USSR to engage in pictorial holography using the Denisyuk method. From childhood, he became interested in graphics, and later painting, since 1986, as a freelance artist, he has been participating in the artistic life of Yerevan and St. Petersburg.

«Tigran Malkhasyan is a physicist, chemist, optician, engineer, mechanic, programmer who constantly invents, builds, remakes and improves outlandish machines, devices and devices.

All his paintings, objects and graphic sheets are a kind of continuation of these daily experiences that take place in the course of life. With the difference that in art he is motivated not by the desire to arrange life, and not by curiosity about the properties of any object he meets, but by an idea that calls into question the entire previous history of art.

Tigran Malkhasyan is convinced - in any case, he wants to be convinced and convinces others - that art is subject to the same immutable laws as everything else in God's world. These laws, perhaps, are not obvious, complex, elude insufficiently trained researchers - or, rather, are simply not yet within the bounds of serious science. In his opinion, historically it turned out that the study and interpretation of art turned out to be the lot of the people of art themselves - firstly, biased, and secondly, devoid of a solid scientific methodology, i.e., from the point of view of a representative of the exact sciences - dreamers or even charlatans.
And he is absolutely convinced that in the brain of any person certain mechanisms are laid down by the process of evolution, which react to certain stimuli and cause certain - if not thoughts, then emotions and associations. They have not yet been properly explored, and the talent of the artist, according to this concept, is to, ahead of scientists, intuitively find those signals that need to be sent to the viewer in order to evoke the desired responses in his brain. And the better the artist himself feels these signals, the faster he finds the way to the database in the mind of the viewer - the more information he reports, the more vivid emotions he evokes. And there can be no doubt about the brightness of emotions - after all, it was they who guided the behavior of living beings, they helped to survive, to overcome millions of years of natural selection - the ability to read the traces of ongoing processes, to understand what is happening, where to run and what to do - was truly a matter of life and death .
Tigran gives simple and seemingly irresistible, well-known examples: drops of red paint inevitably excite the viewer, signaling pain, danger, death - but also about food, warmth, struggle, victory. Because the human being in the course of his evolution turned out to be both a victim and a hunter.
Examples of evolutionarily programmed emotions can be multiplied, in itself this is not new - but the point is that Tigran Malkhasyan, perhaps the first, built his artistic philosophy on this idea and implements it with rare perseverance.
At first glance, his works represent a traditional abstraction - spots, blots, streaks. He does not send his personal message, does not express his emotions - he pours paint and allows natural forces to act: centripetal and centrifugal, gravity and surface tension, diffusion and repulsion. This is exactly how it happened during the creation of the world - lava flowed, waves ran, precipitation fell, stalactites grew, whirlpools swirled, protoplasm clumped into slimy lumps ... These streaks and blots are not as chaotic as they might seem - the author introduces patterns into the movement of colorful masses , but not with a brush, palette knife, sprayer or other usual artistic tool - he uses natural forces: either he pours paint in puddles, then he allows it to flow freely, or he makes the robot rotate the canvas - in different directions, at different speeds, in a changing rhythm. The streaks of paint are crushed, branched, twisted, spreading streams form the likeness of fractals. For Malkhasyan, an admirer of the great physicist Benoit Mandelbrot, these picturesque analogues of natural fractals are very important. In the streaks, spots and swirls of paint in the paintings, either the structures of crystals, or the clusters of cells visible on a microscope slide, or the stalactites that filled the space of the cave, or the traces left by the wave on the sand, are modeled. As well as shoots of primitive plants, fragments of shells and skeletons, clusters of clouds, knots of blood vessels...
In fact, Tigran models the processes of creation, and with the curiosity of the creator, he looks to see if "it will work out well." Or, to put it more modestly, his canvases are a kind of alchemist's cauldron, where, on a whim, reagents are laid, over which the artist conjures by trial and error in the hope of turning dust and ashes into unfading gold.»

Marina Koldobskaya

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