SEEING LYRICALLY

Even a casual glance through Alexander Sadoyan’s oeuvre – a browse in his studio, for instance, or a scroll through the copious image files on his Website – indicates both the breadth of his abilities and the locus of his preferences. Proficient in everything from landscape painting to fantasy-filled figuration, Sadoyan is most committed to an approach that abstracts from life, that mediates between what the artist sees around him, what he imagines could be around him, and what his head and eyes compose, at once spontaneously and methodically, on canvas. An appealing colorist no matter what he is doing, Sadoyan is always thinking abstractly; he could be painting a portrait of a noted historical figure in Armenian culture (Charles Aznavour, for instance, or Arshile Gorky), or conjuring a still life out of seen objects, fanciful items, and purely non-objective "lines of force," but what drives his paintings and what holds them together is their rhythm and balance, deduced and expressed, in the final analysis, abstractly.

Indeed, no matter how wide Sadoyan ranges in his subject matter, it would seem that almost every subject – certainly every traditional subject, from landscape to still life to figure – serves him less as an image per se than it does as a formal armature on and in which to elaborate on and experiment with pure form. A proud descendant of the original abstractionists, including the cubists (Picasso, Gris, Léger) in France, and the Blaue Reiter painters (Kandinsky, Jawlensky) in Germany, Sadoyan does not simply recapitulate the visual recipes of a century ago, but invests them with his own sensibility, infusing the formulas with his gritty touch, his luminous palette, and his syncopated rhythms.

There are two subjects, however, which Sadoyan emphatically brings forth in his painting. His portraits may be infused, to various extents, with the bright coloration and cubistic planarities redolent throughout his work, but here Sadoyan modifies and harnesses their force and exuberance to the task of bringing forth the soul that exudes from a subject’s face. For the most part, Sadoyan’s subjects have not sat for him in the studio; indeed, he has not met, or even lived at the same time or place as, most of them. They are historical portraits, chronicling the men of the 20th century – Komitas, Parajanov, Saroyan – who represented Armenia in the social and cultural discourse of modernism. Here, then, Sadoyan pays even more direct homage to a whole different group of his artistic forebears, to the people who spoke for his people in the languages of art.

The other subject preoccupying Sadoyan in fact subtly orders his entire oeuvre. "All the arts aspire to the condition of music," wrote Walter Pater, and, like so many abstractionists, Sadoyan is fascinated by the immaterial but irresistible presence of musical expression. Musicality courses throughout his abstract work, but he frequently literalizes the presence of music by composing his abstractions around visual motifs associated with music – the shapes of instruments, for instance, or even stylized musical notation. These tropes, of course, descend directly from cubism and cubo-futurism; but when the neck or curve of a violin appeared in a Braque still life or a bass-clef measure meandered through a Malevich street scene, the musical reference was part of the artist’s construction of general quotidian experience. For Sadoyan, music is also – perhaps ideally – a thing unto itself, not simply a worthy subject but practically a divine presence, worthy of its own icons.

Alexander Sadoyan’s musical paintings, then, are also portraits. Music "looks back" at us from these canvases as forthrightly as do the faces in his conventional portrait works. But, as noted, music also inflects much of Sadoyan’s art, and when we look at his abstractions, or to a certain extent even his more conventional subjects, we can sense him inviting us to look not only with our eyes, but with our ears – that is, with all our senses.  


By Peter Frank