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.
Los Angeles, USA, 2021