Внутренний свет The Inner Light / Das innere Licht

The Work of Rudolf Khachatryan, People’s Artist of the Armenian SSR

Khachatryan’s works are well known to Soviet and foreign connoisseurs of art. In 1986, thousands of people visited exhibitions of his works in Moscow, Yerevan, and Detroit, USA. In our dramatically tense age, the artist’s work, permeated with faith in man, finds a living response among viewers.

He grew up and became an artist in Armenia. His work is linked by many threads to the traditions of Armenian art. Yet his respect for these traditions does not separate the artist from multinational Soviet and world culture. Rudolf Khachatryan absorbed the experience of Italian, German, Dutch, and Russian artistic culture. This is especially evident in his series of self-portraits, one of which is presented here.

With penetrating and demanding attention, the artist looks into himself — and in the same way he looks at other people and at the whole world, joining the aesthetic and the moral experience of existence into one inseparable whole.

For someone seeing Khachatryan’s works for the first time, perception begins with astonishment at his unusual artistic technique: sepia drawing on levkas — a thin white chalk ground. Levkas was used even by icon painters, who would cover the primed surface completely with layers of paint. In Khachatryan’s works, levkas remains pure: into it are placed images of the human being, objects, and landscape. They are rendered with a jewel-like fineness of engraved drawing, in places worked through for the sake of a tangible chiaroscuro form — and for the juxtaposition of different textures: human flesh, clothing, plants… An astonishing sensation arises: the inner light of the object. The monochrome image begins to be perceived as color — now cool, now warm, now brownish-green, now bluish-silver… The drawings are also unusual in scale: the viewer sees large planes more characteristic of painting than of graphic art.

What, then, is the pathos of Rudolf Khachatryan’s art? I would like to draw attention to the particular nature of his heroes: in each of them the artist seeks to reveal character, strength of spirit, the tension of thought — in short, the significance of the personality: spiritual, intellectual, creative. The artist has populated his world with strong, thinking, active men endowed with rich inner lives, and with elegant, tender, graceful girls and women.

Indeed, Khachatryan’s figures call to mind images of Renaissance art. He carefully models the plastic form of every object he depicts. To a superficial perception this may seem like naturalistic illusionism, but a more experienced eye will see here the expression of the artist’s inspired and loving attitude toward the material flesh of the world around him. This is why he needs the light-bearing quality of levkas, covered with a transparent net of the finest strokes: in Khachatryan’s world, light piercing space unites the material with the spiritual, animates dead matter, and brings a poetic principle into the being of nature…

But is such a worldview not archaic in our dramatically tense time — a time of acute social conflicts, ecological crises, and threats to the very existence of humanity? Is Khachatryan’s style contemporary against the emotional and aesthetic background of the painting of Picasso and Dalí? I believe that it is not only contemporary, but timely: it speaks of the necessity of preserving, in our threatening age, faith in Man, in the power of his spirit, in the possibility of overcoming discord through harmony, devastation and the destruction of nature through loving union with it. Without such faith, a person cannot live in the world today; without it, one cannot struggle for the salvation of humanity and for its better future.

M. S. Kagan

Source: Novoye Vremya, 1986, No. 51