“None of this is real,” said Samuel Gareginyan to a crowd of assembled students, faculty, and other curious onlookers in his warm Armenian accent. “It’s a different plane of reality.” And it was impossible not to see what he meant, in a room full of windows called paintings.

The subject matter itself is striking—consider the portraiture of John Curry, dropped into a Byzantine landscape and swept up into a fairy tale. There is a strange dialogue that develops with the characters; among them, but also with us, not far removed from the captivating gazes of old Dutch portraiture. (And they are characters more than they are “subjects.”) The horseman in “Hobby Horse” is playful and vivid in his colors, in his ridiculous pinwheel that he holds under the horse’s mandible-like reigns, and in his delicate hand gestures that reminisce Botticelli’s goddesses. In the background is a medieval village over a moat, cast up on a mountain and enshrouded by a castle wall. There is a half-open door, and a window through which we see a damsel waiting for her anti-hero: This misguided Quixotic figure on a rocking horse, galloping furiously home in some distant, “different” plane of reality.

The most crucial aspect of a fairy tale is the tone of the speaker’s voice. And Samuel’s voice is studied, delicate, and almost obsessive in its quiet texture and composition. Almost all of the paintings are small, but they display a dynamic flare uncharacteristic of their proportion. They are curiously intimate (almost voyeuristic) and inviting, without the need to impose into the physical space.

At the end of the room is a tiny painting in monochrome called “Tarot”, inconspicuous in its corner, understated, and the black horse of the exhibit. There are seven figures huddled over a table crowded with cards and a bottle of wine. Scrawled on the table in medieval blackletter calligraphy is the artist’s name, barely decipherable among the other letters and numbers. The umber-and-sienna palette gives the cluster a sculptural dimension, and the warm lighting picks up their muted features—Rembrandt revisited after Alberto Giacometti and the close of surrealist sculpture.

This sensibility of light and attention to detail carries over to Samuel’s occasional religious imagery. There are several depictions of Adam and Eve, most of them stylized portraits in the manner of a Byzantine cathedral, and all of them the size of a postcard. The piece entitled “Lovers” shows them standing next to each other. Eve has her tell-tale leaf, and they share a surreptitious glance and stifled smiles that provoke the reader’s conjecture without being evident. There is no judgment, but rather sympathy and reverence in the depiction of the most human of Biblical figures. In the background, a single fruit-bearing tree casts a shadow that slips down behind Adam’s hand, creating the illusion that he is grasping the tree’s shadow. And the lovers share a single headdress: An old Armenian fishing ship, meticulously rendered and recalling an image with which the artist associates his own self. As is the case with all of Gareginyan’s portraits, the lighting jumps off the skin and glows without being sharp, and the composition is consistently dynamic. Gareginyan keeps himself and his own experience in the work, constructing a single intimate environment with its lattice of characters and subtle nuances. 

Image: "Tarot," oil on canvas, 20' x 23', 2006

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