Even if only because "transcendent Armenia" has already become a major fact of fine art with the entire work of artist Hakob Hakobyan, Henrik Siravyan had to believe in another Armenia, the land of "magnificent closeness of people to real objects", and I would very much like to see the parade of Hakob's and my friend's paintings like that and title their exhibition like that: You perpetuate my Armenia, sweet and sublime name.
Both observations about our unmistakable niche from the outside world and our magnificent closeness to the real country are from Osip Mandelshtam's book "Journey to Armenia". the nightmare of his person, work, country and time avoided, he admired here the people for whom the tomato was still a tomato and the stone was only a stone, he admired the country that had put him out of the time of the earth and was under this eternal sun as in biblical times; didn't know the language and was happily ignorant of the unrest growing in our souls, which would eventually turn into a collapse. wanted to have a stable mast in this perishing world of the phantasms, the magnificent intimacy of people with real objects.
Henrik Siravyan, observantly and deliberately, reserved a very similar ignorance to himself. He reserved it, being a native of this place, he reserved it, being kneaded and tempered by the mass of this country, the lines of the customs, the page of speech, melody, story. He doesn't want, he doesn't accept, he rejects this universal panic, that if he retreats, he will remain the vanguard, but if there is still movement and progress, he will be next to the ancestor and with him, the vanguard. He does not accept today's blind pilgrimage to my feet, which is the path of the depressed and the weak.
The most important, conceptual significance of the son of the motherland would be the character, whose strict selection is especially pointed out by the exhibition: - William Saroyan, again Saroyan, Parajanov, again Parajanov, and again Parajanov, among his theatrical Sayatnov beauties, who are his creation and are all praised by him, Friends, Family, Bush, Apricot, The bush, the Rock... that call for one name, My Conquerors. Or, The Unstoppables. Or: I am and I will be.
But… They're definitely a winner. The apricot tree is in full bloom, the rock is majestic, the tree is so mysterious and beautiful with a special tendency, Sevan is very beautiful.
And that "specialness", that ostentatious beauty, that deliberate majesty, emphatically indicates something - they indicate that something is not quite right in the soul of our friend and within the very nature itself.
I don't know how, I suddenly noticed that those rocks, which of course are the rocks of eternity, that great dervish called Saroyan, will certainly cross many roads under his feet under this sun, that living Parajanov will, of course, play his earthly time for a long time before becoming an idol, that apricot... but they are the rock of 1993, Saroyan, Parajanov and apricot. They are from 1993 not because they were painted in 1993 or a little earlier, not because they were shown in a hot Yerevan pavilion in 1993, but they are from 1993 and that's it, they couldn't be like this in 1973 and they won't be like this in 2093.
It means that our friend also faced a heavy, neglected reality and was broken, which makes his canvases a lamentation of a man, suffering, scratching, departing nature and departing people. It means: that flowering, that stone wall, that greatness of people are screaming their last cry in front of their loved ones.
We could not bypass the great thinker Saryan. he said: the greats of the Renaissance experienced the joy of their invention of the world, we love that same world out of fear of losing it.
It means that this alarm of destruction is not new and not irrelevant, apart from our elders, it has included other elders in its fields, and some of them, while understanding the enormity of the collapse with all their fatality, still prophesied that man will endure and face the great destruction of himself and nature.
And in order to endure and resist, they have stabilized its moments of ascension, not denying the long hours of its decline, visited 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 the present-day witness of those moments of man and nature.
July 29, 1993