Article: Bishop Zareh AZNAVORIAN'S address at the opening ceremony of Zohrab's exhibition of paintings. Translated by Sebouh Tavitian

It is a pleasure and honour for me to greet, on behalf of the Armenian Church Christian Education Department and in the name of His Holiness Catholicos Karekin II, the presence of all of you at this exhibition of the most recent creations of the renowned and great artist Zohrab.

It is not the first time that Zohrab has exhibited his creations under this roof and it is not the first time that we have had the opportunity to talk about his works and his art. And yet each time marks a new stage in the artist's life, and each time we confirm and relish the freshness that springs forth from his canvases, to speak a new and to communicate something new to us.

Genuine art has a message for contemporary man as well as for men of all times. The subject and the medium of expression chosen are not important. The important is the message, a message that goes to the heart and senses rather than the mind, and affects man emotionally. The true artist reaches the heart directly by virtue of the fine sensitivity and strong receptivity that nature has endowed him with. Thus, if the musician perceives the world around him through sounds and the synthesis of sound, the architect and sculptor through the symmetry of shapes and structural lines, the producer through intonation, pronunciation and movement, the choreographer through the expressive symbolism of graceful bodily movement, the artist perceives the world around him through lines and colour, light and shade and their mystic interplay.

Any painting that is a creation of authentic art is an eternity full of creative dynamism, recreating within the viewer a spiritual moment, revealing facts concealed within his human existence and absent from his consciousness, activating sensitive veins and ploughing new furrows in his emotive world and acting as interpreter for the inner man who is in a much more intimate and deeper union with the outer world than we can ever feel or visualise.

It is an evident fact that in Zohrab's paintings we do not see only colours and lines. The many shades of colour that are woven into a harmonious mosaic are complemented by a dominating tendency for the theatrical and dance like movements, full of grace and symbolism. You need only look at the hands in Zohrab's painting, the ballet of the hands that characterizes, charms and leads to the heart of the painting. Those hands are full of movement and feeling, tenderness and affection, anxiety and expectancy, treatment and prayer, decisive tension and concentrated passion.

Every single painting, oil, Chinese ink or aquarelle is an illuminated message addressed to that man in search of the authentic man within man.

What does Zohrab present? Life, a man with his roots, his history, his ties, his loves, his tendencies, his anguish, his suffering, his struggles.

At first glance there is nothing out of the ordinary in Zohrab’s paintings. Bright colours and delicate lines everywhere. A feeling of peace with an inviting immediacy penetrates your being, a tranquillity that surrounds and pervades you, flows out from every painting. A peaceful morning breaks open before you, an advancing morning that penetrates your soul and reaches the depths of your spiritual world, affecting you deeply, troubling you emotionally and changing the peaceful morning into a twilight of deep human crisis. This is Zohrab's philosophy of observing life and reacting to it.

Focus your glance for an instant on any painting and you will see on the faces of all the characters created by Zohrab a touching sorrow, reflected by the surroundings, that focuses attention on injustice and bitterness created by human imperfections and errors. This sorrow thus becomes an expression of resentment and protest against human society.

It should not be misunderstood, however. Sorrow yes, but pessimism is not present in Zohrab's paintings. On the contrary, his paintings are the best expressions of an optimistic outlook and a positive conviction, without any escape from the real and objective life and aiming at verity through the warmth and beauty of colours.

Even when presenting the uglier facets of life and fiercer aspects of human brutality, Zohrab’s brush veils beautifully the subject without ever hiding it behind a curtain. It is a different mode of comprehension of the world and an expressiveness that make the message carried by the painting more transparent and suggestive.

There is also the presence of symbols. Not only in his religious paintings but in all his creations, Zohrab is the mystic artist who uses symbols for completing the meaning within a painting and makes use of visible symbols as an indispensable means in trying to make the invisible comprehensible. Always faithful to the same principle, Zohrab uses symbols that convoy the positive, the good, and the innocent. Lock at any one of them whether a tree or a flower, a dove or any bird, ful1 ears of wheat or bare branches, a cross or a KHATCHKAR, (beautiful) human bodies or chaste souls, all are necessary and essential elements forming the very substance of the painting and transforming the material to convey the spiritual.

Zohrab's imaginative talent has an irresistible suggestiveness that carries the mind much farther than the visible, where the spirit is liberated from its bonds and constrictions and expands into new horizons where the unrealizable is realized and the unconquerable is conquered.

In fact Zohrab's paintings present the transformed and spiritualized subject treated idealistically. Thus lave is pure, bodies unblemished, kisses sacred, stances bashful and virtuous, glances deep and far-reaching, grief hushed, sorrow restrained, smiles delicately.

And particularly the abundance of light everywhere. An abundance of light that brings to life the colours with all their tints in Zohrab's, distinctive and stained glass-like creations, and in particular flaming red. And they sing a hymn to life and praise the good, the noble, the beautiful and the perfect. The voice of genuine humanity seeking man's transformation and ennoblement.

We thank Zohrab and wish him every success.