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.
Yerevan, Armenia, 2018