When I saw Romeo Melikyan’s artworks, I immediately thought of the pop artist Renato Volpini (1934-2017), one of Italy’s greatest engravers of the 20th century, known for the fantastical creations that made him famous. Like Volpini, Melikyan explores various disciplines, from painting to sculpture to collage, whilst always maintaining the common thread of his stylistic signature: artworks characterised, at the same time, by a sense of a menacing and sombre cosmic omen and, particularly in his collages, by a touch of irreverence.

Gianfranco Guzzi, Art Consultant, Rigel Inc.

Hartland, Wisconsin, United States, 2026

Romeo Melikyan, a gifted painter, is one of those audacious artists who, overcoming various obstacles and taking firm and persistent steps, creates with patience and ambition complex paintings filled with individual approaches that express the artist's perception of the world. The series "Incident in the City" shows that the painter makes the viewer imagine and become part of his unique world. Contrasting buildings with huge crowds, he endows the paintings with a dramatic nature and tension that is reflected still more vividly in his later series "The Crowd", "In Our City" and "Struggle". In these works the painted buildings seem empty and lifeless, resembling enormous ghosts. Looking at these ghosts, one can sense the smell of panic and silence, while the gathering of the crowd that has come to fill the unusual emptiness aims at bringing us back to reality — and the reality in these paintings is the expression of the inner struggle and the rebellion seething in their souls. To make the works sharper still, the artist keeps place and time uncertain, leaving the viewer in complicated and profound thought. The artist could not withstand the temptation to create sculptures. The "Warfare" series consists mainly of iron sculptures resembling military objects — cannons, submarines and so on. At first sight these works may seem quite simple in terms of technique, but through their singular conception and fresh approach they reveal the artist's hidden secrets in a novel way. Collages abound in the artist's work. The series "The Citizens", "The Man's Portrait" and "Composition" illustrate his unique way of thinking and his exceptional taste in synthesising palettes with precision. In his latest "Conflict" series, the world map serves as a background, or randomly chosen parts of the map appear in his small-scale canvases. In these works we see the world as discovered by Melikyan — a world with its seemingly endless and unsolvable problems of conflict. The files of soldiers marching up and down the continents of this map, the amassing of artillery in the air, on water and on land, can leave no viewer indifferent. With such an approach the painter seeks to draw people's attention to the alarming scale of the dangers of warfare on this planet. Moreover, after looking at these works we would state without hesitation that in the person of Romeo Melikyan we are dealing with a serious, singular and truly talented artist, who with his restless and constant quests will amaze not only those who appreciate his art, but art experts as well.

Vardan Vardanyan, Art Critic

Yerevan, Armenia, 2018

Romeo Melikyan is an artist who searches for calm and harmony within catastrophe and chaos. Amid abstract forms and monumental transitions, what draws my attention first is the realist subject matter: the existence of life, the existence of time, the premonition of extreme situations pressing close against the living, the contemplation of the present as though observed from the future. Individual figures come to us as if dissolved into a "we," into the crowd — so that it is the crowd itself that becomes personified, and the elemental acquires order and harmonious form. Melikyan's art might be described as the art of the "post-truth era," when right and wrong have become entangled with one another, when man shrinks from — perhaps even dreads — the very idea of truth. These images carry a luminous, life-giving charge: so much detail and not a word wasted, such headlong dynamism and such heartening places to rest. These images even have a voice. I hear the timid whispers; I hear the wild cries; I hear people's dialogues rising from within the crowd... Bravo, dear Romeo — for your singular talent, for your reading of life, and for having something genuinely new to say.

Vardges Davtyan, Prose Writer and Essayist

Los Angeles, USA, 2021