World and Eternity in Mushegh Grigoryan’s art

They say painting is dead. Even Malevich proclaimed this. But he forgot to add - "died to me." Painting died for Malevich, but the avant-garde artist died for it as well, although not for fine art in general.



Malevich is a great artist, but since his declaration, he has not been a painter. Mushegh Grigoryan's painting seems to bypass all art revolutions and appeals to that childish curiosity in a person who desperately needs to describe and explain the world through the depicted objects, through images. Looking at his landscapes, you feel how nature was formed - its abundant landscapes, mountain bends, the warmth of the valleys, the coolness of the hollows.



When you look at his still lifes, you hear how the substance of life moves in flowers, how brushstroke after brushstroke is born, and how one life flows into another - the life of a flower into the life of canvas. His portraits tell about passion, about the innermost experience of love. There is no higher good than to be that sorcerer who can immortalize the living on the canvas. This is what the Armenian artist does, singing what he sees around him.

Time moves not with a dial, not with arrows, time flows with water, with the flowering of a garden, with a fallen petal. The time of the artist shows through the leaves of the tree and the smile of the model. Time strives to return to the moment when it did not disappear, did not live separately from us, but was dissolved in the nature of things. Mushegh Grigoryan brings us back to the wisdom of the objects, not their interpretation.

In the end, contemplating the work of Mushegh, you come to the question, what is painting? An ironic anecdote comes to mind, told by Kant about three philosophers who were asked to describe a lion. The Frenchman went to the library and extracted the description of the lion from the books, the Englishman went to Africa, killed the lion, and described his hunting trophy, and the German retired to the silence of the office and brought the essence of the lion out of the depths of his creative spirit.



He preferred deduction to compilation and the inductive method. How to describe what the artist Mushegh Grigoryan does? Obviously, to comprehend this "lion" you have to become a Frenchman, an Englishman and a German at the same time. You will have to become not just a spectator, but also the painter yourself, a brushstroke on the canvas, the canvas - an action and a deed.