Valmar is an outstanding representative of the young Armenian figurative artists of the 70's, a craftsman aspiring for new artistic forms.
He has had solo exhibitions in Erevan, Tardu (Estonia), Moscow, Yurmala (Latvia).
He has been exhibited in several countries abroad. Valmar, a graduate of the Erevan Arts and Theatre Institute, is a painter who travels along complex paths of explorations. Professionally gifted and strongly aware of the depth and essence of classical art, Markarian aspires for perfect, complete forms in his paintings as well as graphic works. The rational principle of morphography provides as architectonic character to his oeuvre. With a starting point free of randomness and rash sentiments embedded in the creative process, he aims at the harmony in the mutual ties of man with nature, a palpable materiality, discovering delicate psychological bonds between them. In soft velvety augmentations of color, line and grisaille, he produces interconnected series of portraits, landscapes, still-lifes and abstract arrangements, eye-catching in the sincerity of their execution, the authentic depiction of reality, the simple and structural composition.
The complicated emotional world of contemporary man, in its multifaceted expressions, becomes the thematic raw material for Markarian's output. In the self-portrait and still-life series, created in 1976-86, the contemplative and sensual insights of man and material environment parallel the complex undulations of motion and reflections. The painter places the whole and the detail of the subject in motion and dynamics, which achieve new-found expressions. The classic conceptions of color, size, rhythm are put in the service of exposing modern, fundamental issues.
The landscape series captures by its structural simplicity, by the figurative integrity of delicate and transparent painting surfaces.
The sub-text of the graphic is the mobile interpretations and transformations of contemporary man's thoughts and emotions.
The plastic and structural variety imply the paradoxicality of the painter's sentiments, the "tunes" born of the contact between the I and the world outside.
The harmony of forms of expressions and emotional content, surprisingly creates a pictorial comprehensiveness, at times monosemiotic and easily legible, at others characterized by complicated knots of diverse symbols. The spiritual tension and dramatic accents are transferred to each segment of the surface of the picture, enveloping it in feelings of sorrow, longing and loneliness. The emotional charge born of the active collisions of man with the material world is intimately familiar to the painter; at times they are expressed as a "state," at others embued with deep dramatism.
His "Love-songs" are like breeze caressing the face, laden with the scent of the fields, pure and immaculate.
Valmar's art is multi-striped and manifold. In his works beats the heart of a painter living with the issues of man and life.
- POGHOS HAITAYAN
- Art Critic
Translated by Y. KOCHOUNIAN