Strengers Painting

Arshak Sarkissian’s art is all about contemporary man, the complexities and controversies that surround him as well as his metaphysical peculiarities as refracted through the artist’s imagination. Convinced that the world is a pluralistic place that is not just limited to physical reality and in which many worlds – directly inspired by the arts and literature – are just as factual, his world is informed by the Magic Realism of South America as well as Asiatic Shamanistic traditions. Sarkissian illustrates the supernatural aspects of every day life in his art. For him as an artist, the comprehension of multidimensional realities is fundamental in recognizing man’s own reality, and he is fascinated in exploring the extremes of human behaviour and nature. His work penetrates into the human psyche which he calls ‘its personality’. Sarkissian is an artist as well as an anthropologist of various states of mind who leaves room to multiple physiognomic perplexing interpretations. He is constantly exploring the human personality with its multi-dimensional, multi-layered facets. His drawings are peopled with self-conscious entities that seem to be in psychological experiments with themselves in a process of self-discovery and evolution. It is through such experiments that the personality gives way to the genesis of either a monstrous abnormality or a hybrid of fauna or flora, until human and inhuman ultimately become indistinguishable before the next stage of metamorphosis. Arshak Sarkissian’s drawings express his never-ending yearning for change and the novel. They are figurative as well as contemporary, and are greatly influenced by Renaissance art – the meticulous approach to drawing and the synthesis of both realistic and mystical elements being germane to his art. His characters have an eccentric temperament and an exotic disposition – as this is a vital component in the making of ‘personality’ – and his animal hybrids always divulge extra dimensions and expressions along the way. They emerge from an ancient world that was populated by half human, half animal prototypes, whose mythologies revealed complex worlds, but his drawings place these creatures in a post-modern, contemporary world where they still grapple with their daemons.