MAGICAL THEATRE OF GAYANÉ KHACHATURIAN 

    The art of Gayané Khachaturian stands under a special sign– that of absolute coincidence between the uniqueness of artistic endeavor and artist’s personal image. Gayané is among those pioneers of new artistic consciousness who draw into their focus all phenomenal aspects of European “actual view” and the radical sensuousness and natural freedom of plastic gesture.
    Her compositions appear before us as some precious objects from a Medieval magical shop, which found their natural path into our own civilization and culture. In Gayané’s hand matter brings forth a miracle of transformation, animated in its corporality and its readiness for productivity with a living spirit. It opens up its very texture–as simple and primary as life’s matrix itself.
    Each work of Gayané has quality of a hieroglyph; it possess force of an utmost visual presence and an inner code of mythical and poetic life, imbued with Goya’s “Capriccios” or the “Blue Ballerinas” of Degas. Her forms reveal eternal images, inseparable from human life, as a path which draws into itself all human fates. There are eternal wanderers, “wandering comedians”–as Picasso put it– clowns and clownesses, jugglers and juggleresses, strolling actors who live in the world of flowers and fruits and are subject to impersonal and super-personal forces and energies. They accept the world as they find it and are as spontaneous as children, made part of the great experience of Christian history. Their God-given corporality gives itself naturally to the animating play and in turn rejoices at gifts.
    The art of Gayané opens as a landscape with no boundaries– there are cities and objects, animals and plants and stars that disappear and slide within the folds of mysteries and fairy tales. It exists and keeps balance in a state of great vigilance when, as Franz Kafka once said, at least “someone has to stay awake”.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Vitaly Patsyukov

Vitaly Patsyukov is Head of Esxperimental Programs Department of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation at the National Center for Contemporary Arts, Moscow.