Seyranush Manukyan
Henry Elibekian belongs to that brilliant constellation of artists of the 1960s–80s with whom the formation of post-Sarian Armenian art is associated. They guided our art along the currents of 20th-century European and American artistic traditions, assimilating in a short time their most important achievements—achievements that had long been “closed off” because of the totalitarian system. At the same time, they did this not by copying or repeating, but organically, linking national traditions with the cultural layers of various 20th-century movements.
Within this constellation, H. Elibekian’s work is the most avant-garde and innovative. It more deeply and fully expresses the new worldview and aesthetics characteristic of contemporary art, and it addresses problems that were new for Armenian art. His art does not grant calm or tranquility after the upheavals of the 20th century. The anxiety and harshness of our days, the clashes and contradictions of existence, arouse in the painter a protest against “prettiness” and give him the right to make not only the beautiful but also the anti-beautiful—the ugly side of life, pain—into the subject of art. With their expressive sharpness and the revelation of the terrifying, his works sober the viewer, touch them, never leaving them indifferent. Such a stance places Elibekian’s art on the plane of avant-garde aesthetics, distancing it from traditionalism.
By refusing the task of creating only by the laws of beauty and by bringing into its sphere phenomena of wider scope (not only aesthetic ones), avant-gardism in Europe and America created an entirely new system of images—an original metaphor for attitudes toward life, viewpoints, and understandings—while expanding the range of expressive means. For this path, every new achievement matters. Elibekian takes precisely this path of searching. An uninhibited, extraordinary artistic imagination drives him toward innovation and toward seeking nontraditional forms. Thus, already in 1956, even without being familiar with pop art, he created a painterly still-life composition into which he organically included real objects (“ready-made”): toothbrushes and laundry brushes, various perfume creams and capsules. In the context of the image, these everyday items become metaphors for the transience of human existence (“life is a crushed capsule”). And in 1966 he presented the action (= manifesto) “Dirty Shoes,” whose concept was “Life is universal filth.”
As an avant-garde painter, Elibekian strives to reflect the world’s contradictory and complex nature, its many faces and multiple meanings—something that shapes the artistic image, whether dramatic, eruptive, full of active impulses, or ethereal, subtle, and artistic. From such a worldview are born both the broad range and the diverse manifestations of Henry’s work. There is no type or genre of fine art the painter has not addressed: painting, sculpture, graphics, stage design, collage, design. He also creates in borderline fields of art, fusing theatrical action, directing, new genres and directions of synthetic art, including conceptualism, performance, assemblage, and installation. Elibekian is “omnivorous,” extraordinarily energetic and multifaceted. He is a painter of wide sweep and scale who does not tire and does not stop experimenting. In each of the listed forms, he seeks to expand the possibilities of creation. The constant search for and acquisition of plastic means and new expressiveness of form, the assimilation and rethinking of past and present experience, allow him to express rich nuances of thoughts, experiences, feelings, and “concepts” in various ways, including in multi-layered solutions.
Working with specific materials and within individual genres, Henry Elibekian simultaneously creates synthetic constructions, striving to unite within a single space the expressive means of different art forms. In each of them, he reaches maximum expressiveness.
Elibekian’s painting—whose elements are present in all his works—is rich in the possibilities of color-form creation as the bearer of an innate sense of color, and it shapes the figure without chiaroscuro modeling. Depending on how color is laid on the surface—thick or flat, with a light touch or a flowing line—form is molded through the density of paint and brushstrokes, through the thickness and relief of the paint layer, or through virtuoso, light glazing. Like easily worked clay, paint in the artist’s hand expresses his “I,” the “movements” of his soul. Such form-creating possibilities are evident. Every landscape and still life is created with the tonality and texture most characteristic of its mood and nature. The decorative and textural possibilities of color are especially important in abstract constructions, where the painter also strengthens the role of contours. It is as if powerful color forms emerge from nonexistence, from cosmic chaos, drawing the viewer into their depth—into the “abyss.” In portraits, the complexity and ambiguity of the individual are rendered with particular sharpness. They reflect the author’s complex impressions of his models, including several layers of time—inner world, character, fate, profession, appearance—and, of course, one senses the author’s attitude toward the model (portraits of B. Ushakov, his father, T. Mansuryan, V. Meyerhold, S. Parajanov). Pop-art elements are often introduced into painting: real objects acquire the same tone and texture as the painting. Thanks to qualities different from paint, they enrich the composition, becoming, like paint, its meaningful and constructive material. Thus, Bertolt Brecht’s revolutionary role in theater history is expressed in his portrait through a nontraditional joining of inserts of canvas, wood, and metal, recalling the atmosphere of the playwright’s theater.
The construction of form through colored brushstrokes, flowing lines, and touches is also characteristic of graphic series distinguished by skillful execution and the author’s various techniques. The themes of Elibekian’s graphics are the same as in his other art forms: “People and Masks,” “Flying Structures,” “The Satyr and the Nymph,” “Reclining Women,” “The Horrors of War,” “Metamorphoses,” and so on. They clearly define the field and range of the author’s interests.
Light plays an unusual role in Elibekian’s painting and graphics. It does not come from a natural source of illumination. The lit objects and figures seem to be carriers of light themselves. In certain works (rare portraits of loved ones, individual still lifes from different years), the uneven, trembling surfaces seem to radiate an inner light, reflecting the spiritual energy invested in them. Here inner light has semantic, content-bearing significance. This understanding of light comes from the experience of old and new manifestations of expressionist art.
In sculpture, Elibekian uses Armenian tuff, clay, wood, and metal, while also—including real objects in the composition as in painting. Complex surface treatment, coloring, and toning activate and accelerate the impact of plastic mass. His sculptures are not closed but open into space. Their inner essence is pushed outward into the external world. Simple forms are complicated—fragmented, curved, distorted. Mass gains volume and multiple meanings (works of the 1970s). Elibekian’s plastic art stands out for the play of forms and the richness of viewpoints and planes. He also succeeds in sculptures composed of seemingly air-filled, dematerialized spatial forms—compositions that “play” with space through several curved planes (metal constructions of the early 1980s).
Elibekian’s entire oeuvre is saturated with love for theater, theatrical thinking, and the desire for a holistic artistic organization of space, as is done in theater. The painter partly realized such aspirations in his stage-design projects of the 1970s (1975, Yerevan Drama Theatre, F. Dürrenmatt’s Playing Strindberg; 1976, Spendiaryan Opera and Ballet Theatre, E. Mirzoyan’s Symphony of Light; 1977, Yerevan Drama Theatre, Ye. Charents’ Land of Nairi; 1978, A. Arbuzov’s Cruel Games and G. Sundukyan’s Khatabala at the Sundukyan Academic Theatre). His original inclination toward synthetic art enabled him to create a new type of stage design for Armenian art—namely, the performance’s figurative program. He never produced mere decorations attached to a staging; rather, through stage design he aimed to express as clearly as possible the author’s concept (= conception). The figurative and constructive systems are meant to create the emotional and artistic atmosphere of the performance, determine the course of actors’ movement, and include the characters’ images. Stage design assumes “directorial powers”: it is the performance’s “optical directing,” or the artistic-spatial formula of its idea.
Henry Elibekian is a broadly educated individual. With professional depth he has studied not only fine art but also printing, theater art; he has traveled widely and experienced world culture through originals. He is interested in music and literature and seriously engages with contemporary philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis. In recent years he has been writing analytical articles about the nature and forms of creation. A wide intellectual horizon and mastery of the possibilities of many arts guide him toward synthetic art—conceptualism, performance—and intellectualize forms of expression. A certain theatricality of thought has its roots in the painter’s biography: he “could have been born in the theater.”
Henry comes from the old Tiflis Elibekian family, where art was a way of life and artistic genes were passed down by inheritance. His grandfather was the “ustabashi” (master) of the Tiflis locksmiths’ guild. His father, Vagarshak Harutyunovich, also a painter, revived the image of old Tiflis in his miniature painterly narratives. He led the Armenian theaters of Tbilisi for many years, designed productions, and was an Honored Worker of Culture. His brother, Robert Elibekian, is a well-known painter. In the Elibekians’ Tiflis home—“Hayartan” (the House of Armenian Art)—the flower of Tbilisi’s интеллигенция gathered. The children grew up “in the atmosphere of theatrical backstage,” acted in performances, and took part in their design. The stage, props, scenery, and costumes became an inseparable part of Henry’s life. It is precisely from Tiflis—where Eastern and Western traditions crossed, where life was as if theater and the old lived within the new—that Elibekian’s love for theater and the unusual emerges. (He studied theater art no less than painting: at the acting faculty of the Yerevan Institute of Fine Arts and Theatre under V. Ajemyan, and at the acting and directing faculties of the Georgian Theatre Institute under M. Tumanishvili.)
The desire for a holistic artistic organization of space is realized step by step through the creation of a new universe, akin to theater. It is a complex, multifaceted world where several art forms are united, combined, and interlinked. Henry synthesizes painting with plastic art, collage, and graphics. He fuses them through a unified color system, through the uneven surface of painting and colored sculpture, through light, and finally through a shared real space in which the viewer is also present. The combination of sculptural and painterly, real physical and handmade spaces gives rise to a new artistic space like a stage, encompassing diverse art forms. It survives and functions by the will and laws of the author, who assumes the role of director.
In 1968, at the initial stage of the painter’s creative path, his concept was clearly defined by the outstanding avant-garde scholar, Professor D. V. Sarabyanov: “In Henry Elibekian’s work, painting, sculpture, the object, architecture, the stage, and costumes are wonderfully combined. From this fusion arises a new type of spatial-object activity which today has already posed yet another problem—time. He has always searched and still searches today for a new synthesis. He searches not because he does not find, but on the contrary because he finds and, having found, lavishly spends. Henry is a lavish artist; he lives not by what has been created but by what is yet to be created, and therefore much still remains for him to find.”
A distinctive model for this creative concept were the “spatial boxes” covered with painting created in the 1960s, into which the painter placed fragments of old carpets, fish and bird scarecrows, real objects, sculptures, inserts of wood and cardboard, painted in the same manner as the surface of the “box.” The “boxes” are illuminated, and the objects can rotate. These Elibekian “boxes” seem like experimental miniature stages opened toward us. But unlike theater, it is not actors who “perform” there, but the painter’s “thing-heroes.”
In the 1970s Henry begins to combine painting and colored sculpture: he attaches full sculpture to a painterly composition, to a diptych, or joins relief sculpture to painting. By then, already combining three spaces—pictorial, sculptural, and real—into a single system in which the viewer is also present, he recreates the theatrical stage space without a stage platform and without the theatrical frame. This combination is not formal: the viewer, drawn into the space of the composition, becomes a participant in the action, one of the acting persons—thus entering the real space of the action (“P+S” = Painting + Sculpture compositions: “Shakespeare,” “Dostoevsky,” “Shostakovich”). Thus a defining feature of Elibekian’s art is developed: the equal coexistence of viewer and artwork and their participation within a shared real, physical space.
Gradually these compositions become more complex, combining with ready-mades, collage, and clothing; assemblage and installation appear. At Elibekian’s solo exhibition in 1981 at the State Museum of Arts of Georgia, the “impossible” Elibekian assemblages for Soviet times were presented—“model-characters” of costumes and acting persons made from various junk and useless items. They were so original and impressive that the enthralled Sergei Parajanov (who at that time had not yet created his installations) expressed regret that “Henry’s characters are piled up in the hall, instead of accompanying the viewer along the staircase from the museum entrance to the exhibition hall.” Many of Henry’s installations embodied the idea of life’s absurdity; others express the harshness of today’s reality; still others entangle the human being in webs like a spider.
In the “P+S” compositions and assemblages, the sculptural element was ultimately replaced by the human figure, introducing new dimensions into his art—movement and time. Animating the program of depiction, in the 1980s Henry creates a painterly-plastic action that, through a synthesis of temporal and visual-spatial arts, is close to theater and borrowed from it. Yet unlike theater, even the movements of figures here are a means of expressing the plastic talent and conceptual creation of a single individual. H. Elibekian’s actions-performances appear: 1985 “In Memory of Yakulov,” 1986 “P+S in Time and Space,” 1993 “Armenia Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow,” 1998 “From Unbelief to Faith,” 1999 “The Feast of Bacchus,” 2001 “Love the Human Being,” 2002 “Minas” and “Spit Is My Manifesto,” 2003 “Hamlet Is Not Hamlet, or Vengeance for the Father,” and others.
Henry Elibekian’s actions-performances are conceptual projects composed of action, installation, environment, photo- and video-plot, and television editing. Often they take place amid the artist’s easel works, which serve as a background “tension” for the actions. Each action is unrepeatable because it occurs within a specific time interval; when repeated, it is transformed. In each action, the act of creation occurs before the audience’s eyes, making them participants in the artistic process. Sometimes the audience’s reaction-actions are planned in advance.
Elibekian’s actions are always topical and express his civic activism. They are distinctive artistic symbols of both aesthetic and non-aesthetic phenomena—social, philosophical, erotic, psychological, historical. At their foundation lies an idea, a concept, that becomes movement and speech. Speech, exclamation, and their rhythmic repetitions are important ritual components of Elibekian’s performance-actions. The actions are also based on the “gesture that serves as the painter’s tool.” Through gesture, the brushstroke is placed on canvas or the sculpture is molded; through that same gesture in performance, the movement of the painter’s body and soul is expressed—revealing his inner essence and deep structure. In Elibekian’s own view, gesture constitutes the performance’s distinctive text. Movement and facial expression, like gesture, also attempt to express the author’s awareness of what has been done. Colors and ready-mades take an active part in the action-composition of the manifesto. Unlike many Western authors, Elibekian’s performances and conceptualism are never devoid of pathos and the aesthetic. Their expressive artistic system instantly awakens the audience, conveying the pulse of the artist’s nerves, from which his entire oeuvre is woven.
H. Elibekian’s experiments and innovations, his avant-garde language, have great significance for renewing the plastic and synthetic means of art, rejecting templates and stereotypes, and expanding creative possibilities. Being self-valuable and taking on diverse forms, they make it possible to address themes of collision, protest, dormant instincts, the opposite side of life, its beastly visage, absurdity, and struggle—themes that are entirely new and urgent for contemporary art. At the same time, one must not forget that Henry Elibekian is the author of rich painterly talent and excellent purely painterly and graphic works.
The painter’s honest, passionate art expresses the Spirit of our stormy, turbulent times.
2004–2006