Untitled Document

________________________ THE MINIATURES ________________________

The painter's studio,

where everything is only an intermezzo between two paintings, an illusory interlude, a respite in which he barely believes, or at least not to the point of allowing time enough time to take its time.

In his mind with its highly structured images, the painter faces a sort of challenge, and in anxious and suspicious vigilance he takes on this new challenge: “The Miniatures”.

After the New York series, the Giants of Montreal, Poems in Flowers, Tone on Tone, the Male Model, the Female Model, Tatossian could not stop. Having seriously injured an arm in September 2004, he decided on his new project during his convalescence – the miniatures.

Since he still dreaded the blank canvas, he crossed his arms and legs to lock his body. He exhausted himself on the small 5 inch by 7 inch canvas as if this were one of the 8 foot by 30 foot paintings of the Giants of Montreal, with a melancholia or a languor that made him shiver as if the canvas was refusing to allow him his pleasure – the pleasure of painting.

Even though he surrounds himself with the city or the countryside, flowers in summer or winter, they still do not belong to him.

Tatossian, the vulnerable representative of life, wants men, women and children centuries from now to be able to contemplate the beauties available to us today. As if he believes that they won't last forever.

His canvases of landscapes or cities, people and flowers are intended as an abstract realistic representation of a panoramic space with vast horizons, planes extending against architectural landmarks and compositions that sometimes have a central core, sometimes a complete or incomplete diagonal structure, straight or twisted, two oblique perspectives joined by a vertical perspective, two vertical perspectives joined by an oblique perspective.

The Master of Colour of the Seventies has not changed. He is tending towards a miniaturized schematization of graphic design and towards a simplification of colour by the interplay of hot and cold, reds, oranges and blues, or beiges, browns and yellows, chromatically deploying the contrasts and interactions of the dualities between day and night, intensity and tenuousness, opacities and transparencies.

As in his regular-sized paintings, we find the same fullness of emotional density and quality.

He worked alternately with the knife, the spatula and the brush, on so small a canvas but with a concern for erasing the traces of superfluous paste, refining and flattening the material while fleshing out the texture with a glimmering obtained by using the spatula to strip spots and streaks of tone or bright colour and by the multiple shades of colour and the skillful application of abstract values.

The abstract figurative was also accentuated by the non-parallel precision of the drawing and the virtuosity in the use of colour.

In the canvases taken from nature, breathing becomes spasmodic, stability becomes abstraction, the earthly foundation disappears, the painting closes in, and the composition extends beyond the realism of the scene without an objective and rational relationship with reality.

At the same time on the miniatures, new attitudes and more dynamic new gestures make their appearance: the interplay of hands and fingers is more restricted.

In this collection, there is a real renewal of the pictorial approach, as well as a change of palette, which henceforth are associated in the fictitious space of the abstract figurative, miniaturized in a dynamic composition, as if electrified by an unexpected challenge while still retaining the painter's signature.

Tatossian occupies an important place in Canadian and International painting since the Sixties. The man has enriched our collective heritage and has inspired many other painters. Instead of dwelling on determining this place, I prefer to let you judge for yourselves within the context of this collection.

More than ever, Tatossian is a painter who bears witness to his times, engaged in the ethical struggle for the restoration and maintenance of peace in the world. There is no more noble struggle or more urgent cause than humanism.

Oils, 5" X 7" Sold as;

LIMITED EDITION BOX SET