Visual Language Studio Visit with Featured Artist Tigran

Tigran Tsitoghdzyan:

Reflection in the Age of Technology

by Rebecca Kilman

“People are my landscape,” contemporary artist Tigran Tsitoghdzyan explains. “I’m just an observer. I love being lost in the crowd and feeling anonymous.”

Yet, Tsitoghdzyan—who goes by Tigran professionally—found himself set apart from the crowd at an early age in his native Armenia. Henrik Iguitan, founder and director of both the Modern Art Museum and Children’s Art Museum based in Yerevan, hand-picked ten-year-old Tigran to star in a solo exhibit featuring over 100 of his paintings. Tigran doesn’t make too much of his impressive start. “For me it was normal. My class came to the exhibit with my art teacher. She told me I could do better.” Tigran humbly jokes, “I actually had really bad grades in that art class.”

Tigran grew up surrounded by intellectuals. He painted in his parent’s living room, listening to their friends talk politics, philosophy and music. He credits his parents with his down-to-earth attitude about his early success; they didn’t show him articles about his first show or subsequent European and American openings until he was twenty-two. As a result of this no-nonsense attitude, Tigran says, “I never felt that I was different than anyone else. It was just that I liked to paint.”  

 

Perhaps this insistence on anonymity and normality prompted Tigran to leave behind the acclaim of his home country in 1998 and study in Europe as a young man. While he found success there, New

Tigran arrived in the Big Apple five years ago determined to make it his home. “I love to watch how people of different cultures connect to each other here. That is the magic of New York.”
 

York had been on his mind since a visit at age fourteen for an exhibition of his work. “At that point in the Soviet Union we didn’t know much about foreign countries in general—going to New York was like going to Mars. I couldn’t find a Guns ‘N Roses CD at home and then I came to New York for that trip and was front row at a Guns ‘N Roses concert. I was talking about New York nonstop after that.”

Tigran is especially interested in how people interact in this new era of technology and social media. “It’s the era of selfies,” he says, referring to pictures people take of themselves on their phones and cameras. This fascination with self-reflection is captured in Tigran’s work. His images of mirrors suggest a close examination of self, and yet the hands held to the face in many pieces shield the subject from outright observation. Tigran wants to convey the same disconnect that occurs when a small child holds his hands over his eyes and believes he is actually hiding in full view. 

Tigran’s work explores the way people use the Internet to convey images of themselves. There is significant transparency in an online profile—individuals offer the particulars of their lives up to the larger community. We see the faces of Tigran’s subjects through the screen of their hands just as we connect with people through the filter of the computer screen. Tigran elaborates, “Contact with people today is very different from how it used to be. It is influenced a lot by social media. When I’m on the street and I see people taking Facebook pictures, I know they are curating a very specific story about themselves.”

The details of these stories are what drive Tigran’s ten-hour workdays, as he labors over the particulars of each face. Oil painting allows him to spend longer on each painting and achieve a realistic effect. “The technique is an instrument I need to convey the details. I use oil painting to tell the story. Not the reverse.” 

The detailed faces in the “Mirrors” series tell a story about the artist as well as his diverse subjects. Tigran explains that one Mirror depicts an older Armenian lady whose hands entirely cover her face without any transparency. This beautiful grandmother represents a very old culture and lives with a past she is not yet willing to share. In contrast, Tigran describes another Mirror of an attractive, self-aware, young American woman with an open face. “I’m in between these two realities,” Tigran admits, “I live here in America but my background is from Armenia.” 

Tigran reflects that the inspiration for his work stems from both the incredible diversity of cultures in New York and the transparency of the individual on social media. Tigran is fascinated with how people present themselves in our Age of Information. In a way, Tigran himself is the mirror: observing and reimagining the reflections of the individuals who stand out in the crowd.

 Tigran Tsitoghdzyan

http://tigran.ch