If only because “metaphysical Armenia” has already become a major artistic fact through the entire work of the painter Hakob Hakobyan, Henrik Siravyan had to profess another Armenia: the land of “people’s splendid intimacy with real objects.” And I, too, would very much have liked to see the procession of Hakob’s and my friend’s paintings in that light and give their exhibition this heading: “You, my enduring Armenia, a name sweet and sublime.”
Both observations—about our unquestioning aversion to everything metaphysical and our splendid intimacy with the real land—come from Osip Mandelstam’s “Journey to Armenia.” Having evaded the nightmare of his own person, work, country and time, he admired people here for whom a tomato was still a tomato and a stone only a stone; admired a country that had placed itself outside the earth’s time and existed under this eternal sun as in biblical days. He did not know the language and was happily unaware of the turmoil swelling in our souls, which would eventually grow into collapse. In his crumbling world of the thirties, he wanted to have a steady mast: people’s splendid intimacy with real objects.
Henrik Siravyan, too, has deliberately and purposefully reserved a closely similar unawareness for himself. Reserved it as a man of this place, native to the core; reserved it though kneaded and fired from this country’s substance, from the lines of its rises and falls, from the inflections of its speech, melody and narrative. He does not want, does not accept, rejects this universal panic: if it is a retreat, he will remain in the rearguard; if it is movement and progress after all, he will be beside his forebear, and with him in the vanguard. He does not accept today’s blind pilgrimage to the feet of the powerful, the road of the disheartened and incomplete.
This profoundly important stance of a son of his homeland, defining his whole perspective, was to be supported by his subjects, whose strict selection the exhibition especially reveals: William Saroyan, Saroyan again, Parajanov, Parajanov again and once more Parajanov among his theatrical, Sayat-Novan beauties, his creations gathered to praise him; Friends, Family, Bush, Apricot Tree, Bush, Rock… They call for one name: “My Victors.” Or: “My Indomitable Ones.” Or: “I Am and Will Be.”
But… They are emphatically victors. The apricot tree is emphatically bursting into blossom; the rock is emphatically majestic without human workmanship; the tree is so mysterious and beautiful with a particular intent; Sevan is emphatically smiling in its beauty.
And this emphasis, this beauty on display, this deliberate grandeur point to one thing: something is not quite so in our friend’s soul or within the subjects themselves.
I do not know how, but suddenly I noticed: these rocks, which are of course the rocks of eternity; that great dervish named Saroyan, who will of course let many more roads pass beneath his feet under this sun; that living Parajanov, who will of course play out his earthly time for a long while before becoming an idol; that apricot tree… Yet they are the rock, Saroyan, Parajanov and apricot tree of 1993. They belong to ’93 not because they were painted in ’93 or a little earlier, not because they are exhibited in the hot Yerevan pavilion of ’93. They belong to ’93, and that is all. They could not have been like this in 1973, and they will not be like this in 2093.
That means our friend, too, has encountered a heavy, invisible reality and been refracted by it, making his sequence of canvases a man’s lament for anxious, suffering, struggling, departing nature and departing people. It means that this flowering, this soaring stone, this human grandeur are crying their last cry before someone close to them.
So we could not avoid the great thinker Saryan. He said: the great figures of the Renaissance experienced the joy of their discovery of the world; we love that same world out of fear of losing it.
That means this fear of destruction is neither new nor misplaced. It has drawn other great figures, besides our own, into its sphere, and some of them, fully grasping the fateful immensity of collapse, nevertheless prophesied that humanity would endure and withstand the great destruction of itself and nature.
And so that humanity might endure and withstand it, they made its moments of ascent hold firm, without denying its long hours of descent; they visited it in the hour of its beauty, well aware of the long days of its decay…
It is unnecessary to conclude that the painter Henrik Siravyan is today’s witness to those very moments of humanity and nature.
29 July 1993