Translated from Armenian

I do not know whether drawing in general holds such content within it, but when one lives long with objects, their colour properties recede, diminish, weaken, become shadowed, as nature is in winter; and coming forward, their "eternal" properties settle in our mind — form, matter, content. I did not say that the colour properties disappear. No. They go on living, hidden to a certain degree, and it is precisely in that degree of "hiddenness" that they are present in the portraits and still lifes of Rudolf Khachatryan, and in the landscapes which have taken their place in his work in the latest period. It is as though a slogan were pasted on the brow of all the pictures: "All the people and objects that come into contact with me are made of light." I believe that "declaration" of Rudolf Khachatryan, because it is made by genuine art, which in its turn demands an unrepeatable devotion, and my faith rests on his unbroken fidelity and inexhaustible inner strength. His fidelity to art also explains his temporary “flight” to Moscow. This too happens: people flee familiar places and the “violence” of their native surroundings in order to understand themselves and find an objective assessment of their own abilities.

I am not speaking of those who stay. I am with them, and it may be that they are braver; yet those who “flee” are sometimes more resolute, as happened with Rudolf. Of course this does not happen to everyone. This is my years-long inner argument, which, thanks to his art, has come to such a conclusion. I mean to say that whatever he may have gone after, the result is that wonderful painting which makes everyone acknowledge its noble charm and its enduring value. Even the most exacting viewer would want to see his own portrait among those he has made.

His early youth spontaneously foreshadowed classical drawing in the proper sense of the word: in 1959 he received a prize at the World Exhibition in Vienna for "Portrait of a Girl", and it seemed that this highest appraisal was enough for him to find his bearings in art. But the world was seething with new currents and downfalls, while we, behind the "iron curtain", heard only their distant, heartbreaking echoes. Yervand Kochar (the Maestro) scattered the golden grain of the newest art in Yerevan’s newly opened cafés and studios, and a flock of talented young people pecked at those golden grains so as to lay golden eggs in the near future. There was a terrible thirst to know and to take in the world in all its manifoldness and variety — because people saw in this the only way to be freed from violence. Socialist realism had turned into a cudgel and endlessly stifled beneath it free thought, free thinking, even the attempt at it, even its consequences. Then the wind of Khrushchev's freedom to some extent cooled the red-hot chains of art, though it could not strike them off.

Rudolf Khachatryan is among those fortunate people for whom the desire for freedom stands above any title. His years in the newest forms of painting were both a testing of his powers and an expression of that desire. We can now say with certainty that he was a temporary guest there. He had to return to his starting point, classical drawing, where he had something profound to say, where the material was inexhaustible and discoveries awaited him. In solitude — let it not seem strange if I say, in his Moscow “hermit’s cell” — he was able to examine his inner world at length and intently, and to order his relationship to the world. Such a state is always accompanied to some degree by a spontaneous philosophy, once again endowed with a primordial taste and scent.

His interview with H. Ayvazian, printed in the daily "Sovetakan Hayastan" on the occasion of the exhibition's opening, was a brief but faithful formulation of a spontaneous philosophy years in the making: "there have been the Father, the Son (sculpture, painting); now is the time of the Holy Spirit (drawing), into which the previous two also fit." Christianity has given the world inestimable values and has sought through its ideology to order the world and human life, and of course one may systematise by its laws certain regularities in art as well. Yet, needless to say, the chief thing is man, the human constitution, and it is to him that Rudolf Khachatryan has devoted his life. His portraits are not for passing time; the ancestors of his portraits have already lived on this earth, still live and will go on living, while the portraits themselves are duplicates of a biography: outside politics they carry a whole system of the properties of the human race — the system of man's unending existence.

It is probably just this that S. Yamshchikov has in mind when he writes: "As a restorer and art historian I often deal with works of art created by painters of various epochs, countries, schools and styles. Involuntarily the criteria applicable to the monuments of the past become the starting point for assessing contemporary phenomena of visual art. And I must say that Rudolf Khachatryan's works possess those qualities which already today allow them to be called museum pieces."

This affirms that the work is seen within a historical biography. It was Rudolf Khachatryan himself who discovered levkas for drawing. Levkas is more luminous than the cardboard on which he used to draw. Its greater stability and durability are self-evident: icons have been painted on it for centuries, and this too, we should remember, is an attempt to return to the beginning. But I have no doubt that the abundance of light was its first attraction. Light emerges from people and things. In the Christian understanding — and now also the scientific one — that radiating light is the human soul, the store of energy that sustains life and keeps energy transformed into matter, the body, in motion until its complete exhaustion… It is then released again, for another form of matter… Perhaps this is how Christian painting depicts saints, making their eternal part, the halo, visible. The halo of Khachatryan’s figures is dissolved throughout the entire image. The image itself strives to become wholly light. He might wish to adorn some of his chosen sitters with halos, particularly because during his conscious life in the “years of stagnation” he saw people who did not turn into a swamp, who endured and resisted at the cost of immense losses in everyday life. Yet they were rejected; they could not be painted, let alone adorned with halos. Perhaps the artist will do so now, since he accepts classical assessments of human life and art tested over millennia, and sees himself within their bounds.

Khachatryan’s manner of drawing is a stubborn, painful, sustained concentration. On a fairly large surface of levkas he chooses his starting point, most often the most complex thing: the human eye. From there he works towards the completed picture over arduous weeks, sometimes months. Much has already been said about his drawing possessing the value of painting: through the density and sparseness of lines, a single colour acquires many shades, giving drawing the illusion of painting. This is no artistic sleight of hand, but great mastery in revealing another possibility of art. As an expression of a worldview, it is a Christian principle of restraint. If he can affirm it alongside the twentieth century’s greed and its urge to swallow the world, then it affirms an Armenian person’s outlook and the beautiful forms of human existence. One might think this idea had to be excavated from the depths; in fact, it speaks openly from the pictures.

As a sitter and viewer, I want to describe a sensation closely connected with the process of drawing. His sharply pointed pencil begins to shape the eye and moves forward by tenths of a millimetre, discovering new forms on the face with all their details, lights, shadows and hair. A point comes when the unfinished picture becomes so identical to the sitter in its sensuous, living qualities that the sitter feels the pencil’s touch on the levkas on their own skin. He seems not to be drawing but to be transferring a living organism onto the levkas, an entirely living organism joined to the sitter by an umbilical cord. Perhaps that is why he draws with such extreme care and fixed attention, in stony silence, without an eraser or water, placing every line once and finally. I am not speaking of his countless “lightning” portraits in sepia, which attest only to his mastery. This is a profound expression of faith in and reverence for his work. It cannot be associated with searching or questing. What is there to seek when the sitter is before him and his aim is to immortalise the mortal, each time endowing the sitter with his solemn regard and adorning them with half-fairytale and chivalric attributes?

Incidentally, about those attributes. Even if it is not formulated in his mind, subconsciously, through his pictures, he speaks of humanity's losses — of the absence of the chivalric and the "fairy-tale" in the life of today's man, at the same time emphasising the existence of those qualities in himself and hence his faith in their rebirth. In some pictures this perhaps reaches excess, because for the affirmation of that idea, say, the roses at the neck of the girl in the picture "Profile" and the furs tucked into the hair gathered at the crown — which do not in the least hinder the transmission of the girl's softly radiating beauty — are far more impressive than, say, the turban on the head of the "Caravan Leader" or other costumes in other pictures. Incidentally, this too, like everything, is a personal impression.

One more question, which perhaps should have been spoken of in connection with the artist's move to Moscow, but which, with particular emphasis, we shall take up here, since it is one of the first starting points of our attitude to his work, if not the very first. It is the question of the national belonging of his art. I do not believe that in any real artist his national genetics can die out entirely, however cut off he may be from his milieu, and there are many examples to confirm my thought. The Paris-based Armenian painter Jansem paints the genocide of the year fifteen, or the memory of his people's life in Western Armenia, and his splendid pictures raise no doubt as to their national belonging.

But an artist such as Rudolf Khachatryan, whose starting point and source of inspiration is the sitter, the particular person, has a strong need of an Armenian milieu in order to create a system of national features. The exhibition testified that the artist himself is also concerned with this question: he presented not only a group of portraits of Armenians but also turned to the images of Narekatsi and Komitas, and moreover painted purely Armenian landscapes and the old courtyards of Yerevan, filled with memories of his childhood — showing that his drawing too possesses the same boundless possibilities as painting.