VIDEOS AND ARTICLES

" The Making of Yeghernica " (2009/YouTube/9:06 minutes)
Numerous Television Interviews
artworld
(1992/Color/VHS/24 minutes) 34.95 AW16 Two from Beirut
The Daily Star
Feb, 15, 2002 – by Tiare Rath
La Revue du Liban
Nov, 2005 – by Sonia Nigolian
Aztag
Jan, 2008 – Anoush Tervantz
Al - Liwa’
Jan, 2008 – Zouheir Ghanem
Al - Nahar
Nov, 16, 2009 – Laure Ghorayeb
PUBLICATIONS

Al–Nahar, November 16, 2009, Laure Ghorayeb
Mondanités-Décoration, June 2008, Nada Akl
Al-Anwar, February 2, 2008, Z. Hamoud
Prestige, February 2008, Claudine Hardane
Al-Nahar, January 28 2008
Al- Liwa’, January 26, 2008, Zouheir Ghanem
L’Orient-Le Jour, January 26, 2008, Maya Ghandour Hert
Massis, January 2008, T
Al-Balad, January 23, 2008, Christy Abou-Farah
Ararat, January 22, 2008, A
Al-Jarida, January 22, 2008, Rou’a Al Hojairy
Aztag, January 18, 2008, Anoush Tervantz
Prestige, December 2005, Claudine Hardane
Aztag, December 2005, Anoush Trvantz
La Revue du Liban, Novembre 2005, Sonia Nigolian
L’Orient-Le Jour, November 2005, Z.Z.
Al Balad, November 2005, Nermine Abou Khalil
L’Agenda Culturel, November 2005
Esquisse, July 2002, Sonia Nigolian
Magazine, February 2002, Micheline Abou Khater
Al-Nahar, February 2002,  Laure Ghorayeb
Massis, 2002, Mimi Yozgatian
Prestige, April 2002, Roula Rached
La Revue du Liban, March 2002, Sonia Nigolian
L’Orient-LeJour, February and March 2002
Daily Star, February 2002, Tiare Rath
Al Dalil, 2001
Al Liwa’, April 1999, Zouheir Ghanem
Al Fifah El Arabi, April 1999, Omran Kaisi
Prestige, May 1996, 1999
L’Orient-LeJour, April 1999
Al-Nahar, April 1999,  Laure Ghorayeb
L’Orient-LeJour, April 1999
Al-Nahar, April 1999,  Laure Ghorayeb
Snob, September 1994
The  Point, Arts Magazine (Al Nokta), Issue N.3, 1994
Al-Nahar, August 1994, Nazih Khater
Magazine, August 1994, M.N.
L’Orient-LeJour, August 1994, Karine Safa
Aim, March 1991, Neery Melkonian
Beirut Times, February 1991
Asbarez, February 1991
Nor Or, February 1991
Armenian Observer, February and March 1991


Artscene, 1991
Artweek, March 1991, Jodi Garnett
Los Angeles Times/Calendar, March 1991


L’Orient-LeJour, November 1988, May Makarem
L’Orient-LeJour, October 1987, Nabil Abou Dargham
Massis, December 1984
Magazine, December 1984
Al Mas’oul December 1984
Aztag, November 1984
Magazine, November 1984, Zeina Sawaya


SELECTED ARTICLES

DOUBLE PERPETUAL MOVEMENT

By Joseph Tarrab, art critic

Solicited both by the human body and oil painting, Missak Terzian gave himself at first to stylized figuration with a cubistic slant. His natural impetuosity, zest and bravura as an inborn colorist carried him soon towards a vibrating lyricism of the brushstroke. Guided by the body’s outline as organizing pattern, his brush assaults became the true motif of his canvasses.

His favorite subject, the double bodily scheme of the seated couple, spotted oddly enough in the random criss-cross of black paint drippings of a Jackson Pollock’s work, motivates, directs and manages in a way the painter’s interventions, very few of them being concerned with iconic representation. Often a certain time of observation or even decipherment is required to detect and make out, amongst what seems to be a chaotic tangle, the main features of the body, the ‘strange attractors’ of the head, shoulders, breast, arms and legs.

The surface of the canvas is a field of multidirectional forces-colors. Seen one by one or in restricted zones, they seem to be totally abstract, scattered, incoherent and meaningless, were if not for the underlying regulating scheme that magnetizes them, lending them convergence, coherence and signification. The figuration results from a combination of graphic and chromatic non figurative elements.

This description applies mainly to Missak Terzian’s middle production period. The earlier period offers a more straightforward reading of the couple as an image of complementary duality, intimacy and tenderness but also of stability and permanence, in striking contrast with the frantic dynamism of the brushstrokes and the heated fauvism of the color scheme.

In the subsequent period, a triangular abyss tapering towards the center of the bottom edge of the canvas opens up between the legs of the anonymous or rather universal couple. After that, the couple tends to disappear almost completely as a recognizable motif by turning into vertical filiform strokes where torso, arms and buttocks are barely marked by delicate inflexions of the brush with colors that have lost their once expressionistic intensity to take on more understated tints and shades.

The painter does not need anymore to assert himself in the excess of an overflowing expressive energy. A minimalist proceeding takes over, a murmur instead of a scream, without affecting either the spontaneity or the swiftness of execution.

Missak Terzian’s paintings are constructed by deconstruction and deconstructed by construction. To find their way inside them, the onlookers have to identify with that double paradoxical perpetual movement, the very same that continually does and undoes couples and human communities.

The Vivacity

UNRESERVEDLY COMMITTED

The vivacity, dynamism and movement of Missak Terzian’s paintings are such that they draw the onlooker into their chromatic dance. 
Beyond this first visual impact, what at first sight seems destructured or deconstructed begins to take on structure and configuration; figures and shapes start to emerge.
When he does not depict a trio of musicians or a solo tree, Missak Terzian likes to picture the duo man-woman, the human pair in their ups and downs and their transformations, from not so close proximity to complete fusion.
The polarity established through the repartition of the canvas surface into two right-left parts weaves a net of vibrations of more or less high frequency between the terms of this asymmetric symmetry, depending on the warmth of the colors, the amplitude of the gestures, and the intensity of the emotions of the painter.
 This oscillation between the masculine and the feminine, the visible and the invisible, the inner and the outer, the stable and the unstable, the fullness and the void, the simple and the complex, the finished and the unfinished confers vibrancy and pulsation to Missak’s canvasses, beyond the primal split that, always, ignites the dialectics animating them from the inside, from the feelings, the ideas and the reactions of the painter.
His work consists then in trying to restore temporarily a perpetually broken balance, until shapes and colors end up playing in concert, with the multiple rhythms and tempi this implies, from andante con moto to crescendo furioso. The restlessness of Missak’s strokes does not allow more relaxed and appeasing rhythms. His canvasses induce a catalytic, galvanizing, electric atmosphere, like musical beats that make the body move to their pace almost against its own will. They achieve this result despite their static underlying structure.
The paradoxical nature of Missak’s paintings is that, although they look like lyrical abstraction, the more they are scrutinized, the more relationships and figures are revealed, emerging from behind the attractive shimmer of a very physical workmanship to which the painter seems to commit himself unreservedly.
Hence, arguably, the onlookers’ temptation to respond with their body, outlining in three dimensional space, if only at their nascent state, the ample movements materializing on the canvass.

by Joseph Tarrab

BOOK

To reveal his 25 years in painting, the artist shows in a book the different phases of his work.
The 138 reproductions chosen for this retrospective represent his successive works starting 1978. The book is a luxury edition of 128 pages, with a hard cover and a jacket. Published in November 2005, it is available in France and through the artist’s website.
Reference codes: ISBN 2-913330-35-5
EAN 9782913330351