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The imagination of Mouradian is as impressive as his creative ambition. In his paintings visual language replaces the magic of words, graphical mastership allows for narrative efficiency and is intensified by a luxurious palette. This has some resemblance to miniature painting and declamation. The painter loves materials and takes pleasure in suggesting clothes. Practice of oil painting allows him to express the savor of things and their tactility. His brush polishes details, dissects them until reaching a gustative enjoyment.
And painting always has the last word. Metaphorical as well as delirious, surrealistic and fantastic, it gathers, in hybrid evocation, buffoons and acrobats, beauties and shrews, flora and fauna of the Eden. The inspired talent of Daron Mouradian makes him associate Bosch's universe to the fairy world of the One Thousand and One Nights.
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" La Gazette de l'Hotel Drouot " no.12 (22 mars 2002)
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East and West merged on the soil of Armenia. Mouradian is the worthy heir of this half-caste culture swept with pain. While cultivating his origins, he was fascinated by the History and the Mythology, which founded and revealed the civilization of the Mediterranean Basin.
Therefore, his paintings depict as many resurgences of this unchanging and marvelous past, the magic of which we are no longer able to understand. Mouradian succeeded in taking this magic and reinventing it. In his paintings the neatness of the stroke, which we sense that the artist masters perfectly, models the sparkling colors. Figurative and evocative, each canvas is a clever blend of technical and esthetical perfection, of elaborated details serving the gloss of the imagination. Here the grotesque comes close to the sublime; the legend dominates the reality and one allows oneself to be filled by the magic of immutable periods of reminiscence. Mouradian speaks to our imagination; he makes forgotten dreams reemerge in our conscience. His colors revive the period of fairy tales and one is happy to learn that he paints as others flee, spontaneously, without sketches or models. But this ability to flee is not suspended of reality. We see the cruel tale emerging from the marvelous fairy tale when Mouradian stages the ridiculousness of power and the absurdity of violence. Isn't the strength of his work in the elegance with which he stages his disappointed conscience in a fabulous universe? His works are beautiful, his criticism bitter. One must recognize the obviousness of his talent of lucid magician. |
Lorraine-Soeli HEYMES
Art-criti
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A "gunner-philosopher" sweating under the weight of his knowledge, a morose musician carrying his instrument like a no longer useful trophy, a buffoon "mayor" carrying a mouse in a basket, a strict heraldic animal head with a hooked nose and a pear perfume, a fantastic war declaration supported by "heavy artillery" headed by a turkey. This enumeration in the style of Prevert summarizes the magical theatre of the Armenian painter Daron Mouradian. All human adventures and failings march past our eyes like the film of a surrealistic radiography of our moods.
If he is inspired by the mythology of his native East and the legendary discovery of the West, he meanwhile accomplishes a real work of alchemy, transmuting this memory potential into magnificent inventions with recurrent and sublimated extravagances. So, he establishes, in jubilant freedom, the basis of a painting, in which figuration reinvents itself in graphic opulence and the truculence of colors competes with a cavalcade of heteroclite things, never spoiling the harmony of the entire work. Tragicomical caricatures of personages come close to the ridiculousness of burlesque situations with the aplomb of marvelous realities. The fascinating magnificence of Daron Mouradian's works never hides his primordial will: to denounce vanities, the violence of powers and human illusions. His talent consists in doing it with the elegance of the soul and the gorgeousness of a Cyrano become painter. |
Francoise de CELIGNY
"Univers des Arts'', no. 67 (mars 2002)
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Daron arrived in France bearing a wind coming from the East, like a breath of air laden heavily with dreams, with true or marvelous stories, epical or lyrical poetry. This perfume of childhood has the ability to excite adults, this procession of mythic characters has a name: it is the imaginary world one can see in the oil on canvas paintings signed by Daron Mouradian. Born some forty years ago in Yerevan, and after taking a course at the Artistic School in the Armenian capital and a six-year experience in sculpture, Daron Mouradian allowed himself to be carried on the wings of his fecund imagination. Aiming to describe Mouradian's works will mean to summarize in words everything that has happened on this Earth either in the reality of facts or in the fiction, or everything which is hidden in the brain of each one of us, even attempting to interpret the more simplistic gaze of an animal. Being an excellent drawer, always figurative and close to the forms, which one sees and meets in everyday life, Daron Mouradian constructs his landscapes in smooth material. As a good colorist, he doesn't hesitate to introduce clear and gay reflects with colors; he opens his universe for original characters, which he puts in unexpected postures and situations. He invents for them a world, in which fairy tales exist, and where we are invited to follow him. This, we always do with pleasure in order to fill ourselves with a simple happiness. But if the funny character is sometimes, and even often present, the drama is well hidden. The artist skillfully avoids dramatization by the ridiculousness he introduces to describe a situation or to paint a typical personage.
Nevertheless, there is a sphere, which seems reserved and sacred to Daron Mouradian. That is the female and especially the maid. He is an artist, but also a male. He finds no joking matter in the beautiful and pure features that he assigns to the weak sex. Of course, he sometimes disguises those weak females, puts large hats or extravagant and colorful attire on them. Equally, he undresses them with a few agile and well placed strokes of his brush, or generously lets us catch a glimpse of their hidden, but charming intimacy, always giving to those flash dolls an expression of innocence accompanied and underlined by fine features with perfect outlines. "The Circus", "A Walk" and "The Portrait of a Girl" give evidence to confirm this.
Daron Mouradian is a painter, both a humorist and a poet, a creator of international scope, but also an inventor of fairy tales and marvels, for finding another world means to create! Completely unique, he knows how to amaze and charm us. |
Christian Germak
"Arts", no.103 (mars 2000)
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