On Friday June 9^th, 2006 Mah Art Gallery in Tehran, opened an exhibition of Sirak Melkonian’s sketches, titled Vibrations. The exhibition was a great success and showed the artist’s great spirit in discovering and exposing new horizons in modern art.

The following article appeared as introduction to the book published for the occasion.

Face Value: a review of Sirak Melkonian’s sketches.

Bahram Bahrami

 It is almost four decades now since I first  exposed myself to the amazing world of Sirak Melkonian. Ever since I have kept the young boy on that hot Tehran summer evening in me and with me, watching with astonishment a world that unwraps new layers of horizons. I vaguely remember the other works by Iran’s prominent artists who shared the space with Sirak during the group exhibition. His works, however are still vibrantly exposed in front of the very eyes of me. They were and still are part of a world of some amazing ‘inner-real places with no record in the past’ as Alain Bousquet, a well known art critic wrote about Sirak a few decades ago, ‘a world beyond liking or disliking, beauty or aggression.’ Jean Marie Tasset, a Figaro columnist, believes his works are windows to a world ‘deep in the soul of the artist.’  

 Sirak’s paintings in general, remind me of an old fable rewritten by famous Iranian poet, Rumi: a few blind men are left with an elephant in a room. Each one gives an account of what an elephant is, after they touch the animal. For one of them an elephant is a long rough thing like a tree trunk, for another it is a short tail, for a third one a smooth piece like ivory and so on so forth. None is able to give a ‘whole’ picture of the animal.

 ‘ It is not easy to arrive at a conception of a whole which is constructed from parts belonging to different dimensions’, writes Paul Klee, as if explaining Rumi’s theory, in his excellent introduction On Modern Arts. ‘And not only nature, but also art, her transformed image, is such a whole.’ 

 Sirak’s works represent, not only the elephant in flesh and in whole but at the same time the dissected anatomical pieces of it. He has achieved significant awards such as first prize of Paris Biennale, 1959, first prize International Art Exhibition Tehran, 1974 and many other.

The present collection contains sketches that he brought back from his last visit to Iran. As if nature has just strolled  by him and has exposed herself for a few seconds in front of the artist’s Camera Lucida. It is as if we have suddenly caught her off guard walking naked. She disappears or hides herself but the existential / cognitive shadow of her impressions are recorded.

‘The photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.’ Writes Roland Barthes, in his Camera Lucida, ‘A specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent.’

 What we see here in this collection and Sirak’s works in general, are not a blind representation of the world around. Though in these vibrations, as Sirak calls them, we can immediately point to the nature or the natural elements. Here we see the world in flesh, like the elephant; but this time in the light of our own Camera Lucida. 

Sirak eradicates and replaces the lines and curves of the natural world with his own lines. Eradication and purging is the necessity of modern sketching. Physical effacing of the world. The world that we used to see blindly. We were left blindfolded to see.

 A miniaturist once was boasting of being able to utilize backgammon in a tea house into his work. Once also I  saw a miniaturist applying perspective into his works. Both of these artists forgot why the classic miniaturists had omitted and evaded reality. Eradication of the real and creating what we see in Persian classic miniature, is the foundation of that type of pictorial narration: a narration, with its own face values, a different narration.

 Narration, I say. But Sirak’s works in this collection, are not of any narrative or pictorial approach. They are, as his critics have said, beyond good or evil.

 Sirak  intends to show us the wholeness of the titanic elephant called existence.