"Our task is to embody in ourselves this transient, temporal earth so deeply, passionately, and with so much agony as to have its essence arise 'invisibly' inside us. “This statement of R. M. Rilke gives one a deep insight into the art of Lev Markosyan. He has retained faith in the process of painting as an exclusive act of cognition and radical renewal of the world. The multilayer, thingish pictorial surface of his paintings, the continuous alteration of pressure and gesture on the canvas, the alternating black and ochroid colors, a sudden intervention of a sign - all this tends to distort the size of the canvas surface, which opens up for further transformations, denoting numerous possibilities for metaphoric interpretation of the artist's subject matter (August, My Land). For Markosyan, painting was never an end in itself, or a drive for self-affirmation. A muralist by training, he has worked much in monumental art, making frescoes and mosaics, while constantly seeking to renew his pictorial language. But it was painting that became the artist's sole form of hope, his response to the horrors of everyday reality. It is as if he dares to re-create the world as a vast canvas, to paint it and to shape it anew, by performing the single and ultimate demiurgic act, which alone conceals and expresses the whole mystery of being. "My pictures are artifacts of my existence," says the artist. His images are born out of vague associations, hints, wafts, or remembrances. At times, the artist will destroy an existing structure and gradually fill it with coats of paint to an extent where it seems to be no longer discernible. He can work on a painting for years, now applying coat after coat to a painted surface, now again removing it, and the whole process repeating itself. Whether it is history, or something he once happened to see-the artist's memory filters it all, changing it, or imparting to it a touch of nostalgia, melancholy, duality, or elements of tragedy. He has found his own unique language, which synthesizes different traditions, transforming impulses from the "historical avant-garde" (Matisse, Rouault, Kandinsky, Kokoschka), and contemporary artists (Keefer, Richter, Baselitz). Many of Markosyan's canvases are based on a fine balance between the illusion of reality and an abstract symbolic space, between object and sign. He applies his colours now with light, now with thick brushstrokes, then removes them and reverts again to his subject, achieving the highest point of expressiveness. One's eye plunges delightedly into a pulsating pictorial mass, snatching within its colourful medley separate images - a fish, a bird, or a human figure, - which are perceived as signs evoking various associations. The artist's vision is tragic. "I keep feeling an approaching disaster," he says. Atypical romantic, Markosyan is forever trying to break loose out of the fetters of reality, while at the same time dreading to do so. In his March, weird, dark human figures, shown against the backdrop of a snow-filled, desolate landscape, can be seen as generalized signs of enervated, broken-down creatures guilty of the antagonism between Man and Nature. According to the artist, even as he comes up to a canvas, he has an anticipation of SOMETHING, and as he mixes his paints he is guided by presentience not knowledge. Markosyan sets great store by his material; it is in a struggle with it that these sensations are actualized. As he applies paints to a canvas, they find their intended place as if by themselves. This starts an interaction of motions and transformations until, suddenly, there miraculously appears a THING. A sign, a gesture coupled with a colour capture the pictorial surface, space, turning it into a model of a rapidly changing existential continuum. Light seems to be coming forth from the depths of Homage to Rilke, which is done in burning tones of gold and orange. His colours become transparent, acquire spatial continuity... Strange, enigmatic, symbolic, geometricised configurations now show through, now disappear in a luminous substance, like signs of another, higher reality. "A true song has a different essence. A whirl. A breathing in God. The soul of voids" (Rilke). Markosyan's abstract, non-figurative intermutations apparently do not depict anything at all, but the magical atmosphere he creates evokes a wide range of associations, revealing a host of meanings. In the artist's work, every motif is inimitable in its own way; it either embodies a foreboding, conveys a person's state of being (Requiem, Solitude), or takes on a symbolic twist (Bowl).

V. Khan-Magomedova 26 November, 2000