The Material And The Image

The first precursor of creative incentive was the first contact with the material, with the “wounded wood”. A strange and unexplained contact when with an inner craving the soul, tormented by the heavy, strained experiences, felt its living breath. That itself was an inner dialog with the material-a condition of transcendental communication, which is characteristic to the souls poeticized by divine intervention. 

Just as word leaves its soul-stirring illuminated trail in the texture of a poem, in the sensual world of Mardirian the most insignificant yet flexible natural contour of wood opens new vistas of passion in his imagination by slowly identifying every shading of natural texture with the outline of the emerging image. Just like filmed images are slowly developed on photographic paper, the imagination of the sculptor generates a nude female figure with sensitive, graceful forms and multiple variations.

The creator cannot preview all aspects of the emerging creation, the emotional tonality of his plastic and dimensional transitions. In its inherent essence it all becomes manifest at the moment of creation, as if encoded, defined from above, by an irresistible impulse. Viewed from the outside it seems to be a freely creative improvisation, but only from the outside. It has deeply buried facets hidden in the unfathomable layers of the sculptor’s subconscious, in the layers where a flickering beam of distant moonlight will awaken sudden reverberations and yearnings after the warmth giving birth to completely untested yet primary sentiments is forgotten.

This is a purely creative phenomenon and it is here that in Mardirian’s visualizations one comes across the formerly identified qualities, where by default lies the pure origin of creation according to which the sculptural material, in this case wood, should contain a supreme substance integrating all concepts. 

Just as much as wood itself is the symbol birth and of eternity in life, so each creative experience of communicating its inherent meaning will produce the embodied, perceived aspect of that very mystery which is the image of a woman. 

Within this context, for Mardirian, a female image is absolutely virtual.

It has no personal description, involuntarily becoming a visual statement of the proto-substance as a meaning-carrying concept carrier, emerging in divergent variations of plastic forms.

As noted by Aristotle, a great Greek philosopher, “a work of art is born by the same law as a live seed from the ear.” This concept itself is the cornerstone of Greek sculpture, where the craftsman saw marble as a living body, incorporating the greatest secret of harmony. The same trend is evident in the art of Mardirian where the plasticity of the sculptural material is manifested through its metaphorical semantic interpretation, the only difference being that with the Old Greek it was based upon mythic versions, while in Mardirian’s case the female image is a poetic generalization of the myth. The metaphoric interpretation itself will prompt the inherent meaning of the sculptor’s creative works, the key to its discovery being concealed in his phenomenal capabilities.

Let us remember his UNTITLED sequence of sculpture. Each of them is dedicated to different periods of human history successively called: the 3^rd century, the 4^th century, and so on up till the 20^th century. These are plastic variations of the female figure, profoundly experienced forms of statement proper to the symbolic quality of the complex multidimensional texture, opening the heavenly winds of former times through the somewhat depleted borders of our imagination in this pragmatic age.

As to SEMIRAMIS, PROCESSION, SUMMARY, CESSATION, ASTARTE and many other works, they are genuine masterpieces of the metaphoric plastic interpretation posing as eternal symbols of ever-flowering life created in the living veins of the primordial material.

Mardirian the sculptor comes with his art to testify on the eternal link between man and the spiritual origins of the primordial nature, the illuminated mystery of the human creative soul.

Saro Sarukhanian

Art Critic, Member of the Board of Artists’ Union of Armenia,

Director of the State Museum of Folk Art of Armenia,

Founder of the “Kenatz Tsar” Foundation for Fine Arts