The ‘60s were the years of great changes. They took place in all spheres of social life. New progressive ideas emerged in the public mind during that period. However, their realization required new people – the carriers of those ideas. So naturally, those very ideas created a person’s ideal – purposeful, diligent, strong-willed, decent, candid, capable of great deeds and never retreating in the face of adversity. While such persons were exceptional in the society, art formed its own compass of aesthetic and artistic values driven by life. And yet, the political freeze of the ‘70s forced artists to insulate themselves within the walls of art studios in order to maintain the warmth of their souls. L. Aghasyan’s work is an attempt to perceive that very reality, the level of its internal structure, components and tangibility. The search for the limits of spiritual essence naturally leads to the discovery of substantial essence – light. Light is not merely a creative substance but a necessary part of the content, the foundation, on which the pictorial wholeness of the images and their separate parts are based. This is true, above all, of color, the multiplicity and brightness of which are determined by the amount of light and its intensity. Aghassian’s palette is a spring rainbow. The warmth that the deep and subtle relations of its color scheme will spread on everything, on the animate and the inanimate, making them shine with warmth. The inspiration that is always present in the artist’s painting… the muse that is present almost everywhere in an image of an armless woman. Lastly, this is about love – the synonym for light – in the eyes of an artist, whose gaze softly touches the naked model, the studio walls, observing a piece of landscape from the window. And these smooth contours that sometimes clearly point out roundness, and sometimes get lost in the passages of tints are everywhere. Those passages are so tight that at times may blend in, contrasted with additional colors. However, they do exist in Aghasyan’s palette: he has never been fond of pure tones. The thing is the intense stains and brushstrokes, which so masterly join each other that the unity of color remains. Until the mid-1980s, Aghasyan’s color as realistic, dominated by Armenian traditional color-scheme; from those years on, however, the painter underwent significant transformations. That was, like its prototype, primarily re-evaluation of the role of color. Turquoise, silver, and violet became dominant, not only being the carriers of emotions, but also having a metamorphic character,where tension increases and the overall atmosphere of the canvas is escalated by the dramatic line.

Changes in color lead to transformations of the image structure as well. Symbols and allegory become the most important principles of the painting. The theme of a character wrapped in sheets and tied with ropes. Particularly impressive is the painting, in which the character is bound and put in the middle of the street, right under the rays of the morning sun. Is this the symbolic image of an artist, who cannot find the path of personal rebellion, freedom and artistic happiness? Is this apparition more real than the serene creative state, in which the artist lives for a long time? Finally, does it make sense to break the bonds? But isn’t it the Eternal Return of Zarathustra… to reflect on the senseless and to feel it. In Aghasyan’s case, to perceive the sense, one needs to feel serenity.
1992