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UNCANNY PORTRAITS
TIGRAN TSITOGHDZYAN’S REALISM.
By Donald Kuspit
W
hat are we to make of Tigran Tsitoghdzyan’s his portraits with a photograph—today taking the place of the
large, and black and white, like the negative of a photograph-like has the nuanced touches of a refined painting.
“Mirrors” — big, bold portraits, confrontationally
photograph, the colors of life enigmatically erased as though in
a melancholy underworld? They are clearly masterpieces, but
for all the beauty of the female model peculiarly bleak. How-
ever well-realized—empirically precise, insistently descriptive—
her appearance, she seems peculiarly unreal. The hands that
hide her face, yet let her piercing eyes magically see through
them, suggest she is a delusion. Ambiguously transparent and
opaque, her hands convey the ambivalence built into the artist’s
“handling” of her.
The grandeur of Tigran’s paintings suggests that she is a de-
lusion of grandeur—that he is deluded about her grandeur, has
made her grander and more mysterious than she is in everyday
reality. He has mystified her, so that she becomes the mythical
eternal feminine, the embodiment of the mystery that is woman,
and with that becomes larger than life, a visionary presence yet
still a particular person—Tigran’s wife, the model who is in fact
a professional model, posing for photographers. Tigran begins
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preparatory drawing—and ends with a portrait that however
Carefully constructed of tonal shadows, it has the emotional
subtlety that an everyday photograph lacks. Tigran’s portraits
lend themselves to reflection, invite lingering contemplation, as
a matter-of-fact photograph rarely does. I think this is because
each of his portraits, however labor intensive, have the quality
of a “primary delusion, i.e., one that arises as an immediate ex-
perience, out of the blue, with no external or objective cause or
explanation, but nonetheless with a strong feeling of conviction”.
Out of the blue, in Tigran’s portraits out of the black, that is, the
haunting female face arises out of the unconscious depths how-
ever much it is heightened by consciousness. Tigran’s female
face is always yonder, at an immense distance, symbolized by its
intimidating immensity, however close and impinging it may be.
It is a transfixing, perversely sublime spectacle that the spectator
only dare view in a mirror–see through a glass darkly, as it were—
the way Perseus saw the Medusa’s face reflected in the mirror of
his shield, so that he would not be petrified by its stare
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