Abelian Studio-articles1

Good evening, dear friends! Let me introduce myself first. My name is Natalia Abelian which used to be my maiden surname. [1] I paint, therefore I think My name tells you about my Armenian origin. But most of my life I lived in Moscow where I learned how to paint and how to philosophize. In 1999, I graduated from the Aesthetics department at the Philosophical faculty of Moscow State University. Here I am - Master of Arts, i.e. Philosophy and aesthetics. All of the above had a serious impact on the themes of my works and to my attitude to painting. The process of painting for myself is an act of conscience that obtains external aspect whose purpose is to perceive spiritually and to get to know the beauty. A picture for me is a state of thought that took place. While I am painting, I am thinking. Paints, lines and images all assist my thoughts to flow and to unite, to inquire and to respond to their own queries, to dive out of this shiny and evocative world. The world obeys my will and the answers that my thoughts seek, are found in it as if it were a different world, where truth dwells, where some unperceived interlocutor dwells. My volitional intention to harmonise the colours and all the parts of the painting promotes the self-tuning of my soul. Lots of things which were previously unknown are opened to it. My paintings are dialogues with the world contained in my soul, which, like any other soul, contains all the coagulated Universe in itself. [2] The human soul is eternal I hope you can agree with me on the point that any soul obtains luminous essence as part of its nature. And what is more - the laws of physics tell us that any body that moves with a a speed of light, acquires an unlimited mass and a zero length. Therefore, any soul does not exist within the framework of time and space which means that the soul is eternal. Acquiring an infinite physical mass, a soul contains all the Universe in itself. A human being descibed as a monad - an elementary soul - in the philosophy of Leibniz contains other monads and the whole world in itself. And, wherever we are, there is no chance for ourselves to get rid of each other as all the monads, like atoms, are drawn together. [3] The human soul and the idea of emptiness In the process of creation, a painter produces a process of pulling his soul and his inner world out. As if he strips himself naked, it turns out, however, that it is the universe that is inside him but not himself. And where is he? Nowhere, to cite the characters of the philosophical novel by contemporary Russian writer Pelevin Tchapaev i Pustota which can be rendered as Tchapaev and Emptiness. Buddhist theras and to some extent post-modernist thinkers come very close to the understanding of emptiness, and the latter also speak of the death of an author and of the global cross-referencing in the modern world. Well, we have to refer to our own soul. [4] Eroticism of the artistic creativity Creativity, as any other process of cognition, is an erotic process because it is a process of uncovering and disclosing the beauty. Sensual perception and the expression of beautiful is a sphere of aesthetics. The creative process is both an aesthetic and erotic process. Any talented work of art is impossible without this aspect. Or, according to Freud, the creativity is a sphere and a product of the sublimation. This is close to truth if one understands both the elevation of energy from the lower to the higher mental planes and the transformation of this energy into a more delicate essence as the process of sublimation. To sum this up, the creativity is not only a cognitive, but also an energetical process. [5] Colour releases energy The works of art are not just the thoughts-cum-forms but also the clots of energy. To my opinion, the expression of colour releases certain clusters of energy that make some impact upon the audience. The influence of colour is evident not only on the emotional, but also on the psychical-physical plane. However, this process of creativity may well remain extremely personal process, having no sense for the observer. It would come true, if the conscience of the artist were not to be immersed into the archetypes immanent to the sub-consciencious and therefore symbolical and mythological in their essence. [6] An artist is an empty busket An artist reminds you of a person with an empty bucket. He stands at the well of its soul and draws some deep water up out of it. There he finds strange floating creatures; however, because of their symbolical character they seem to be recognized. [7] Symbols, ambiguities & meanings of art A myth, according to Rolan Bartes is a communicative system, a message. The symbol is poly-meaningful and its interpretation is not one-dimensional. The symbol is an imagery representation of a certain idea, that obtains a potential infinity of perspectives of meanings. Therefore any reading of the painting by the audience is interesting and unexpected even for the author himself. I would rather say that my works differ from each other not by their play of color but by their play of meanings as they are symbolical and mythological. [8] Synthetism and parallelism As far as the parallel character of paintings is oncerned, the thought regarding The Parallel Worlds as the title of the exhibition emerged out of my works where two paintings are situated under one frame and one glass, as if they are parallel worlds. What do you think: do the works, present within one frame, intersect or not? I think they do; they do it in the conscience of the observer who tries to unite them in his synthesis. This creates an illusion of their dynamical character. The paintings unite now in one image and then fall apart. One painting complements another, adding something to its view and meaning. I use the word 'illusion' only because all these cognitive acts are created by an observer if he or she ever does it. If not, the picture stays dumb and dark. Something similar was carried out by punctualists (see works by Soerra) who only applied pure colours on canvas and let the observer get them assembled in his conscience. [9] All binary systems are triads containing a zero member Few more words regarding binary systems & some aspects of parallel worlds suffice. When I was submitting my thesis on Philosophy of Colour, I came across a fascinating expression by A. B. Campe, the symbolic logician, regarding the fact that all the binary systems are triads containing a zero member. Therefore I chose to study the triad of the three main symbolical colours in early and primitive cultures - the red, the white and the black. Later I found out that the principle is valid in physics as well. For instance, magnetism and electricity produce some-sort of an intermediary field. [10] Duality as the basic principle of the Universal existence Coming back to the idea of dual paintings I must say that they contain a deep principle of the universal existence. Probably, our conscience emerged due to the existence of the binary system of the two hemispheres of the human brain, and the outside world, which is called illusory in many philosophical systems, emerged as the zero member of the binary system if the God and the anti-god. The binary (dual) painting is no longer a static object, it is connected with the dynamic principle of the origination of the unity which is immanent to our conscience. [11] Binarity, the Supreme Being and the Cross Similarly, the human beings, living parallel to each other under the glass of the reality, obtain a possibility to get united only in the conscience of the Contemplator. The principle of the binary system lies in the foundation of the symbolism of the cross. Two lines symbolize the manifested reality and the zero member is the point of their intersection, symbolizing its non-manifested character, world in itself, world that does not belong to the world around us, or, using the biblical parable, the world is a mustard seed, according to the image that Christ employed to describe the Heavenly realm (Matthew 13:31). It can be obtained if both the human and divine worlds intersect. Be perfect as perfect as your Heavenly Father. To refer to Friedrich Nietzsche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra": "I teach you of the super-man. The human being is a something that one needs to overcome. The super-man is a sense of existence". Interestingly enough, Nietzsche, being a radical critic of Christianity, was actually one of its great preachers (to judge from his work "Zarathustra"). Spread your human being into the freedom of the divine, as if you use your body as a pier to spread into the ocean, and the truth as a sunny walk will splash under your feet. [12] Paintings and yoga To employ a radically different image: paintings can be compared to asanas, the body positions in the oriental system of yoga. Certain types of energy emerge only due to the static character and the interlocking of certain limbs of the body (or, similarly, of the lines on the picture). Paintings are able to accumulate and radiate the energy. They structure the space according to (or due to) the beauty and the love, and therefore decrease the entropy or chaos) in the outside world. [13] The Beauty will save the world! Dostoyevsky taught that the beauty would save the world. Plato taught that the beauty makes the wings of the human soul grow. Each painting is like a star, it delicately touches your soul by rays of beauty and makes your wings of spirit and wings of love grow, which will carry you on to the unexpressed divinities. Let us say nothing more about the unexpressed, as it can be done only by silence.