Romeo Melikyan, a gifted painter, is one of the
audacious artists who, overcoming various obstacle, taking firm and persistent steps, with patience
and ambition creates complex paintings
filled with individual approaches, which express the artist’s perception of the world.
The series “Incident
in the City” shows that the painter
makes the viewer imagine and become
part of his unique world.
Contrasting the buildings with huge crowds, the
painter endows the paintings with dramatic nature and tension which is more
vividly reflected in his further series “The Crowd”, “In Our City” and
“Struggle”. In these works the painted buildings seem to be empty and lifeless
resembling enormous ghosts. Looking at these ghosts one can feel the smell of
panic and silence while the accumulation of the crowd which has come to fill
the unusual emptiness aims at bringing us back to reality and the reality in
the paintings is the expression of the inner struggle and the rebellion seething in their souls.
To make the works even sharper, the artist keeps the place and time
uncertain, leaving the viewer in complicated and deep thoughts.
The
artist could not withstand the temptation to create sculptures. The “Warfare”
series mainly includes iron sculptures, resembling military objects like
cannons, submarines etc. These works might seem quite simple at first sight in
terms of the technique but with their
unique conception and fresher approach they reveal the artist’s hidden secrets in a novel way. The
collages abound in the artist’s works. The series “The Citizens”, “ The Man’s Portrait” and “Composition” illustrate the artist’s unique
way of thinking and the exceptional taste
of synthesizing the palettes accurately.
For his latest “Conflict” series the world map is used as a background or randomly chosen parts of the map are
illustrated in his small scale canvases. In these works we can see the world discovered
by Melikyan, the world with its seemingly endless and unsolvable problems of conflicts. The file of soldiers marching up
and down on the continents of this map, the amassing of artillery in the air,
water and land can’t leave any viewer
indifferent. With such an approach the painter wants to attract people’s attention on the alarming scales of warfare dangers of the
planet. Moreover, after looking at these works
we would unmistakably state that
in the person of Romeo Melikyan
we deal with a serious, unique and indeed a talented artist who with his restless and constant quests will amaze not only those who appreciate his art, but the
art experts as well.
Art critic Vardan Vardanyan
Referance about a young talented artist Romeo Melikyan, the revelation, of wich has pleasant shades for the sophisticated art critic.
Graduated only from an art college future artist tries to place an order with some stock of identity and world outlook in which the tension of the time and dramatic accents make the spectators enter that "sphere of art"-fixing his restless emotional state in ordinary images of the reality.A man nature, object images never have passive,speculative mirror reflections in his paintings.They are in the field of tension with certain shades of identity. Being aware of world art streams at such an early age. Expressionism, dramatism and dynamics are closer to his art, which are brought into harmony with metaphisic restless vibrations of luminescence.
I think the young artist will have prudence and wisdom to appraise his virtues in their true worth and not to be fascinated with the success of the time for the art is credo and long existence of spirituality.
Art critic Poghos Haytayan
To all the visitors, Berd appears to be a Paradise. Bathed in gentle sunlight after the rain, where mountain dew shivers in the autumn cobwebs, and the air carries the scent of rustling leaves and grasses. If one were to forget that this is a borderland, a place that until recently bore witness to destruction and suffering, without which no human irresponsibility could exist. Here, everything is close - fear, nature, and God. And of course, art. Romeo lives and creates in the borderland of Berd; it is his responsibility, his awareness, and his choice.
In his workshop, there are white balcony doors with iron bars through which Soviet-era five-story buildings can be seen. He uses details found in abandoned factories from the Soviet era to create his extraordinary sculptures - a hybrid of a sperm whale and an airplane with a needlefish, frameworks of buildings that resemble the skeletons of extinct Leviathans, and the tiniest details of enormous anthill-like structures - buildings and cities where everything seems to be present, yet no one else lives there and nobody exists. This immerses us in a distinct sense of desolation and silence, despite the sheer number of details, labor, and generations that have passed since their creation.
A hybrid of nature and immense human labor, which has proven to be senseless due to human destructiveness itself, and yet nature does not abandon us... It always prevails and continues, especially here, in Berd ‘Arménie
Alina Sobolevskaya
