Whimsical Tale Painting

The main character in Van's works is a man of today's time, a time of complex, contradictory, crisis, which in turn is superimposed on an equally complex state of the human soul. The world is permeated with opposite aspirations, full of secrets and riddles. And all this gives our being a chaotic character. The misfortune of a person who is in this reality is that every minute he is attacked by aggressive forces that knock the soil out from under a person's feet, leaving no hope for the possibility of a peaceful existence, when a person can feel his unity with the natural world. In such conditions, artists inevitably appear who, feeling the alienation of this desired world and trying to reflect it, turn to the system of pictorial means that move away from the traditional ones, since this language seems to them insufficiently capable of conveying feelings and thoughts that torment a person. And he already dreams of being in a niche, even for a short time, where there is peace, tranquility, family, garden, flowers, love. Van Hovak, having started his career, got the opportunity to expand the geography of his living space. When he found himself in France, the artist realized that life gives him a chance to expand the boundaries of knowledge of the modern world. Having meet French art, which had passed an interesting path in its development, today moving away from the principles of plot, Van saw that the structure of images in French culture tends towards formal tasks, when there is a simplification of the pictorial system, deformation of natural impressions. Van was interested in developing a new plastic writing with his desire understand the complexities of the world with the help of a simplified pictorial language. Van perceives it with ease, especially since its echoes reach our national creative sphere, adapting to its peculiarities. In the artist's works, there are features of the Yervand Kochar’s, Chagall's, Picasso’s style. He is looking for the outlines of a new world and a new ideal. It is a complex and vague search process. The artist seems to probe the individual details of the surrounding life, knowing full well that they are only fragments of an immense world. Van goes over a set of visual objects (flowers, fish, houses, trees, animals, details of complex mechanisms ...) These objects are involved in the maelstrom of earthly affairs. But a human being is not able to grasp the logic of world events, which nevertheless settle in human heads and souls. The artist endows his heroes and heroines with the desire to determine their place in the environment, without losing tension and desire to see, hear everything, stoically experiencing the attack of chaotic forces, while appealing to the mind rather than the heart. Van's Man does not give up, trying to accept this reality, peering carefully at its manifestations. So, he ponders, like a Rodin thinker, hard, but not doomed ... But he tries to discover the harmony of ancient plastic art and surrenders himself to it with joyful confidence. His female images are lyrical, sentimental, often surrounded by flowers and full of innocent eroticism. Male images are serious, sometimes harsh, they are possessed by feelings of anxiety and melancholic relaxation. The artist conveys these psychological shades with a precisely adjusted line that outlines the structure of the heads, ovals of faces, facial features, the position of torsos, hand gestures ... Sometimes the artist conveys a certain intermediate state, and then his images double, triple, enter with the world into games that are understandable only to him. Color always clearly delineates the zones of its presence, separating them from each other, the environment from the object. And then the environment becomes a receptacle for his thoughts and feelings. Around human images, the artist depicts fragments of their thoughts, running away, quickly replacing each other, but having time to leave traces in the form of exciting symbols and signs. These marks are awaiting decryption. This pictorially impregnable logic of the transition from thought to thought, from state to state attracts the viewer's attention to Van's works, in which a taste of mystery is always felt. The main thing is that the characters can broadly perceive the events of today's world, trying to consider its living face. And the viewer in front of Van's works does not feel impassive, but an actor. Each hero of the artist, absorbing our fleeting time, tries to become a part of this mobile, unpredictable world. Honored art critic Marina Stepanyan