SEVAN MELIKYAN
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STATEMENT
STATEMENTGrowing up in Turkey, land of mosaics and textiles, I established a life-long affinity for pattern and design. The years I spent as a student in Paris and New York, visiting countless galleries and museums, introduced me to the great works that would serve as my only formal training in this field. This avocation took on a new dimension in 2001 when I began applying design software to digital pictures of paintings most important to me. The reductive process allowed me not only to pay tribute to these works, but also appropriate them as my own. By revealing the underlying tone, pattern or composition, I strive to establish a more direct communication with the viewer, and generate the kind of amazement that only apparent simplicity can.
BIO
b. 1965 Istanbul, TurkeyEducation1990 BA, University Dauphine, Paris, FranceProfessional Experience2009 Artist, Consultant, Website designer1997-2009 Director of Marketing and P.R., Van Cliburn Foundation, Fort Worth, TX1992-96 Program Director, Armenian General Benevolent Union, New York, NY1988-91 Digital Designer, Bargy Images, Paris, FranceSelected Exhibitions2007 William Campbell Contemporary Art, Fort Worth, TX2006 William Campbell Contemporary Art, Fort Worth, TX2005 William Campbell Contemporary Art, Fort Worth, TX Selected Collections Acme Brick Co. Mercury ExplorationRosewood Hotels; The Mansion on Turtle Creek; Dallas, TXOlga KernDavide CabassiRepresented byWilliam Campbell Contemporary Art, Fort Worth, TX
PUBLICITY
True Grid by Marilyn BaileySevan Melikyan at once a family man and a multitalented hipster -boasts an equally diverse biography.He was born in Istanbul to Armenian parents, grew up mostly in Paris, then headed to New York City as a young adult before settling in Fort Worth about 12 years ago. lie's a self-taught drummer in a rock-reggae band called The Usual Suspects but is perhaps best known around town as the longtime marketing director for the Van Cliburn Foundation, where he's helped move the 50-year-old organization into the Internet age with such Web features as a YouTube piano contest, streaming video and blogs.That technological savvy played a part, too, in Sevan's self-reinvention as a visual artist, one that drew the attention of Fort Worth's top gallery, William Campbell Contemporary Art, where he'll be part of a group show that opens this month.Sevan (pronounced seh-VAHN) creates graphic, deceptively minimalist canvases based on famous paintings. They're accessible and engaging on their own, but deepen in meaning and fascination as you learn about what inspires him and the process (he calls it a "language") he used to create them.While at first too much in awe of the great artists he saw in Paris to even think of becoming a painter, he gave it a try as a way to create some cheap art. He and his wife bought a vintage bungalow in Fort Worth's near South Side in 2000, and "we had a lot of empty spaces, and we couldn't afford the stuff that we liked," he says.With no formal training, he taught himself color-wheel principles and stumbled almost unconsciously on what would become his signature style. "It was a total fluke that I ran into this process just out of manipulating one of Fernand Léger's paintings." He had downloaded an image of Three Musicians, a painting he had always loved, and began digitally manipulating the image. "I cannot understand what led me to mess with it, to put it in Photoshop and try to get something else out of it," says Sevan. "It makes no sense: Why would I do that?"But he instantly liked the result. His distortion of the image "started to become pleasant enough to the eye that 1 wanted to paint it." I le had found a way to possess a beloved work of art, in a way, and make it his own.His transformation of the Leger painting became a grid of uniformly sized squares whose color pattern loosely follows the original, although the composition is radically simplified and altered. This work, the beginning of it all, now has a place of pride in Sevan's living room, but his art evolved rapidly from there. A mutual friend told Fort Worth art dealer Bill Campbell about Sevan, who had completed only six paintings. Campbell went to see these first works and immediately accepted several of them for exhibit at William Campbell Contemporary Art in 2001.Most of Sevan's paintings have titles like After Monet's Poppy field or After Van Gogh's Starry Night. That first uniform grid has given way to a more varied language of lines, rectangles and squares (his canvases have no diagonals) that originally begins on the computer screen. After a careful analysis, he makes a series of choices about what to eliminate from the original: A nightmarish Francis Bacon self-portrait is transformed into concentric rectangles that somehow convey much of the same intensity. Andrea del Sarto's The Last Supper morphs into chunky vertical lines that call to mind a Sean Scully painting until you see it side-by-side with its inspiration.Although his work may invite comparisons to Scully or Ellsworth Kelly, Sevan points out he's up to something very different."[My art] involves pop art, because 1 am referring to iconic masterpieces, and minimalism, because there's a whole reductive process that comes into play. But it's also expressionist, because there is emotion involved and there is a relation to a recognizable subject-It is not disassociated with the subject."He's still charmingly reverent about the artists he's inspired by, and is modest about his own achievement."I'm still 9 years old as a painter. I'm still insecure. I would feel almost naked and very self-conscious if I were just put out there onstage without the support of these great painters who I've based these pieces on. I need their support. I need their presence." He likes to see his works exhibited alongside a small photo of the original, and sees himself as a kind of decent, a guide to a different way of seeing the masters' works.But his works stand on their own as minimalist, graphic statements with balanced compositions "pleasing to the eye," as he might say. He knows of one couple who purchased one of his paintings and accidentally hung it upside down until he explained its origin.Sevan is an astoundingly quick study he never picked up a drumstick until 2003 and has been playing in The Usual Suspects since 2004 and has had a lot of good things happen to him by accident. He studied marketing in college and always wanted to work in the nonprofit world, he says. He met his wife, Maria Guralnik, who manages the Cliburn medal winners, when as a marketing professional working on an Armenian arts program in New York, he contacted her about a Cliburn finalist who happened to be Armenian. He followed Guralnik to Fort Worth and landed a job at the Van Cliburn Foundation not long after, in 1997. They now have a young son, and both are busy with the quadrennial Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, which ends June 7. Sevan has been racing to finish his latest batch of paintings for his exhibit this month (all were inspired by last year's impressionist show at the Kimbell Art Museum). He paints at home, in a front room that also houses his drum set and his computer desk and shows you at a glance how busy his life is."My dream is to completely devote myself to making art. Whether I do it earlier than 60-something or whenever I'm supposed to retire, I don't know."And he doesn't foresee changing his painting method, although he says he's willing to follow it wherever it leads him. "This is something I really want to pursue until I have nothing left to say."
ESSAY
The Art of Sevan Melikyanby Andrew MartonThe art of Sevan Melikyan is one of reduction, of a clean yet sensually realized abstraction distilled from a panoply of aesthetic influences. One need only look at the numerous ports of call or stamps in Melikyan's literal and spiritual passport, to understand the multi-layered nature of his art. His past hovers somewhere in all his present work. From the storied traditions of rug and textile weaving of his native Turkey, Melikyan derived a sense of the geometric power born of the assiduous braiding of assertive verticals and horizontals. The tiled mosaics that abound in Istanbul's museums and religious edifices demonstrated to the young Melikyan a sense of how the rigid placement of stone, with only minute variation, could yield a shimmering work bristling with possibility. Paris, and more specifically that city's wealth of works by Leger, Modigliani, Matisse and Picasso would act as a crucial siren to Melikyan's early artistic muse. A teen-age Melikyan would literally commune for many evening hours in front of his favorite works by this coterie of post-impressionists and expressionist masters. Their works would spur Melikyan to cultivate an early realist style in a number of miniature pieces (often based on his photographs) always given away as gifts to friends. If the works of Picasso and Matisse planted the initial seeds in Melikyan's style of the power of astringent abstraction, it would be the works of Joseph Albers, Sean Scully, and Ellsworth Kelly - all painters Melikyan discovered for the first time when he moved to Texas - that would steer him towards the artistic domain he currently inhabits. These modern, abstract-expressionists gave Melikyan the license, if not the outright legitimate permission, to throw himself completely into what is now his trademark style of a personalized abstraction which trembles with minimalist seduction.Enter the computer and one has a crucial ingredient in Melikyan's artistic laboratory. Already a gifted computer graphics artist, Melikyan began to manipulate on screen the basic visual elements found in such favored works as Leger's Three Musicians or Henri Rousseau's The Dream. The result of Melikyan's re-casting of both grand works was abstractions that both existed on their own and suggesting the themes that peeped out of the classic originals. Melikyan then took the crucial next step of converting to canvas what he had first incubated on screen. "When I brought the two together, the computer and the original work by Leger, it really was an act of love, a very positive and happy act to give birth to a new picture and this process of minimizing," Melikyan now says of one of his earliest pieces. The highly finished quality of Melikyan's paintings is all the more remarkable considering that he has never had any formal training as a painter. Instead, he seized upon the highly expressive color palette, bordered by a matrix of almost sculpted lines, of such artists as Kelly, Albers, Indiana, in order to carve out his own path of visual expression. In the world of a Melikyan painting, characters radiate a gamut of personality from bland to captivating, all through Melikyan's choice of color tonality drawn from an enormous spectrum. The resulting cavalcade of protagonists has both all the obvious qualities of a flesh and blood character, along with all its indeterminate mystery. "The process of reduction allows me to focus on what I find essential in my subjects," says Melikyan, "revealing mysteries in color, composition and sometimes even content. I want to establish a direct communication with the viewer, hoping to generate the kind of amazement that only simplicity can." Melikyan says. Sevan Melikyan was born to Armenian parents in Istanbul in 1965. He moved to Paris at the age of 9 and stayed in France until age 26, earning a degree in marketing from the University of Dauphine. He spent six years in New York City, directing a program devoted to the promotion and presentation of artists of Armenian descent. From 1997 to 2009, he lived in Fort Worth, Texas where Melikyan was the marketing director for the Van Cliburn Foundation. He now makes his home in High Falls, New York, a small village nested in the beautiful Hudson Valley.
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