THIRTEEN PERIODS in the Creative Life of Rudolph Khachatrian

ooking at the works of Rudolph Khachatrian, you understand that this man has had several lives. Moreover, recalling your long-time admiration for his creative work, you understand that you have also lived more than once. For a dilettante, a gulf of times lies between Khachatrian's early superclassic portraits, admired by people even in the dead years of the stag­nation, and his present-day non-figura­tive objects.
Only now, looking through the cata­logue issued for the exhibition of his works, you understand from his collages, bronze and cogged objects resembling puzzles, that Khachatrian almost has returned to his surrealistic and cubist studies of the 1960s. The artist counted 13 periods, "creative skins" which he shed, having worn out each of them to the end.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the brilliant artist painted portraits filled with unfor­gettable warmth and light. That time was quite different from the present. The artists worked to create something eter­nal because there was no other choice. They tried to create something imperish­able because there was a deadlock ahead. In the early 1970s, one could quietly spend a year establishing a studio in a neglected garret of some multistory house in Moscow and remain in it for ever.

It is strange, however, that an artist who felt he was a dissident outside time made classical portraits of people, a landscape, a shoe, a tree, a stove, a pan, continues to stand above public opinion, plunging into the "serial music" of monotonous forms and their rhythm. How many artists can throw off their own image in the eyes of others? It is not only a truly artistic but ethical gesture of a master. It will be recalled that Rudolph Khachatrian was expelled from an art school three months after he entered it, that he studied only four years in school, and that his father drove him out of the house as an "idler".

Khachatrian is made of such contra­dictions that reveal him as a genuine artist. His portraits permeated with light created a sensation at the exhibition of 20-century Russian artists held in London in the late 1980s. He remained in London for five years after this exhibition, and a radical change evi­dently occurred in his mind there. Khachatrian understood that the time of framable easel painting had ended. For a long time he could simply not look at human faces.

The artist said that he went from "flat" to "multi-dimensional" thinking. The people who valued the creative work of the "former Khachatrian" do not understand why arms and legs protrude from his objects, insult­ing "good taste" in this way. The matter is that his works combine not only sculpture, painting and drawing but also the time in which they exist, independently of people, as the formula of man.
At the age of 15, Rudolph, who had only heard about the famous Russian artist Repin, amazed professionals with the inward similarity of his works to those of Leonardo da Vinci. The current model for him is the Creator.

The artist cites the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas: When you make one of the two, when you make the internal form look like the outward and the outward form look like the internal, when you make the upper part look like the lower, when you make an eye instead of an eye, an arm instead of an arm, a leg instead of a leg, and an image instead of an image, then you will enter the kingdom of God.

The people acquainted with Rudolph Khachatrian note that each new period in his work begins with self-portraits. The multi-dimensional vol­umes created by him now are also a self-portrait, a hole in outward life beyond which the artist catches and conveys the pulsating essence of man. It is a mirror image of the living being breaking out of hardened forms.

The acknowledged master, who has had profitable orders and enjoyed worldwide success, is going into a state appraised by some people as a creative whim and failure. Khachatrian acknowl­edges this and says: "Perhaps we shall finally understand one another. Perhaps you will at least believe the artist whom you loved. I have paid for this 'failure,' as you call it, with my whole creative life. Why are you so sure that you are right?"
The disputable character of Khachatrian's present activity does not prevent the holding of major exhibitions of his works in Moscow. Two years ago, such an exhibition was mounted in the halls of the Academy of Arts. Earlier ones were held in the House of Artists on Krymsky Val and in the Tretyakov Art Gallery, Moscow. The latest exhibition was orga­nized at the Museum of Modern Art. The fine catalogue issued for it is supple­mented by a CD-Rom on which the artist presents his multi-dimensional objects and the long development of his creative activities. Khachatrian's early works are heart-stopping. They are not simply the portraits of people, pictures of objects and landscapes. They fill the viewer with love, light and essence.

An artist cannot and should not be given orders. A genuine artist moves along a road that becomes clear only when time brings us to his level.