Review

Rendezvous with a Scheherazade

I have a queer feeling that none other than a Scheherazade from The Arabian Nights has made an appointment to meet me somewhere here…in these very pictures. Having tired of entertaining her slow-witted king, she has chosen to busy herself with her own life. Examine the picture “Poems of Love” closely. Do you see the maiden’s face, her slender waist, the shy tenderness of her look, and her posture’s overt, natural eroticism? Doesn’t the girl pictured by Karen Kazinian remind you of someone?

   I have used the word “picture”, but is it really only a picture? Sure enough, it appears to fit perfectly the notion of a “picture”, it is indeed a work of art, painted on a canvas measuring 45 cm by 110cm, smelling of paint, and rough to the touch. But why, then, can I smell a warm breeze waiting from the canvas, and scent of herds lending their aroma to the setting, yet burning hot, sun? How is that I hear the music of waves lapping against the side of the moored boat?

Is this some kind of hoax? Like a rose, I am the plaintive weeping that hides, at times, in the laughter of eternity.

       It is, I guess, because the world which the painter has all of a sudden (incidentally or not is insignificant) half-revealed to us exists in actual fact. It exists as the condition of a soul materialized in time and space, and as a labyrinth by way of which something has reached us from the dark of time: as an outcry that we, as fate willed, have been able to hear.

As fate has willed too, Karen Kazinian can read even whispers that should have been reduced to dust long ago.

     As for Karen, he was born in the place with an equally unique historical back-ground, in the Armenian town Goris. There is a church there whose building was started in the 8^th centuries AD. And there is a stone, named Navel String, which, centuries ago, would attract woman seeking to become pregnant. In the surrounding mountains one can find symbols of an ancient pagan cult. All those things were once part of the world in which the boy used to live. And now they are part of the artist’s living world.

         As for Scheherazade, watch the picture “Dream Coming True” as closely as you can…Can you not see that she is somehow sending us her regards?

                                                                                                          Galina Scorobogatova

                                                                                        Moscow Today and tomorrow. April 2003