Painter Vladimir Margarian (Valmar) is an outstanding representative of the young Armenian figurative artists of the 70’s, a craftsman aspiring for new artistic forms. He has had solo exhibitions in Yerevan, Tartu (Estonia), Moscow, Yurmala (Latvia), USA, Hungary. He has been exhibited in several countries abroad.
V.Margarian, a graduate of the Yerevan Arts and Theatre Institute, is a painter who travels along complex paths of exploration. Professionally gifted and strongly aware of the depth and essence of classical art, Margarian aspires for perfect, complete forms in his paintings as well as graphic works. The rational principle of morphography provides as architectonic character to his oeuvre. With a starting point free of randomness and rash sentiments embedded in the creative process, he aims at the harmony in the mutual ties of man with nature, a palpable materiality, discovering delicate psychological bonds between them. In soft velvety augmentations of colour, line and grisaille, he produces interconnected series of portraits, landscapes; still life’s and abstract arrangements, eye-catching in the sincerity of their execution, the authentic depiction of reality, and the simple and structural composition. The complicated emotional world of contemporary man, in its multifaceted expressions, becomes the thematic raw material for Margarian’s output. In the self-portrait and still-life series (“Still-life with glass plates”, “Self-portrait”, “Still-life with flowers”, “Still-life with pomegranate”, “Still-life on a carpet background”), created in 1976-86, the contemplative and sensual insights of man and material environment parallel the complex undulations.
The classic conceptions of colour, size, and rhythm are put in the service of exposing modern, fundamental issues. The landscape series “From my window”, “Noon”, “Street in Hankavan”, “Evening” and “Winter” are among the achievements of the young artists. It captures by its structural simplicity, by the figurative integrity of delicate and transparent painting surfaces.
The sub-text of the graphic is the mobile interpretation and transformation of contemporary man’s thoughts and emotions. Their plastic and structural variety imply the paradoxically of the painter’s sentiments, the “tunes” born of the contact between I and the world outside. The harmony in the forms of expressions and emotional content surprisingly creates a pictorial comprehensiveness, at times monosemiotic and easily legible, at other characterized by complicated knots of diverse symbols. The spiritual tension and dramatic accents are transferred to each segment of the surface of the picture, enveloping it in feelings of sorrow, longing and loneliness (“Indifference”,
“Discomfort”, 1980). The emotional charge born of the active collisions of man with the material world is “state”, at others embed with deep dramatism (“Requiem”, 1984). His “Love-songs” are like breeze caressing the face, laden with the scent of the fields, pure and immaculate. Vladimir Margarian’s art is multi-striped and manifold. In his beats the heart of a living with the issues of man and life.

Poghos Haitayan
Art Critic