Aïda Kazarian

Tcharadjidji or the disobedience of the artist by Alexandre Vanautgaerden

In Armenian, Tcharadjidji is a familiar expression used to tick off unruly children. This admonition should be understood here as a metaphor of artistic life, in which you are often ticked off when you get off the beaten track. And yet an artistic adventure resides primarily in disobedience, and in the experimentation of untrodden ways.

For a long time now Aïda Kazarian has decided to let her body do the talking. Most of the time her paintings arise out of an event or a memory that moves her, whether it is a happy or a tragic one. She paints to utter a sudden joy or to give vent to sorrow. With her body. With her hands. Sometimes she works on minute spaces (golden round cake doilies, 5 centimetres in diameter), sometimes on several metre long spaces (when she paints on seemingly endless rolls).

She plants fingerprints. But that isn't all, since the painted object is after all only the last act in the play. In Aïda Kazarian's work emerges first and foremost a deportment, a certain way of being in the world, in harmony.    

The gestures forming the thread of her paintings are repeated day after day in notebooks, as though she were doing her scales. She memorises the gestures she invents in order to be able to perform when the day comes, to make room for improvisation when the painting is there and has to be painted. This painting is a stage in a long journey in the course of which the artist's body has swung into action. This is a performance each time, of which the painting is the archive rather than the imprint.


Aïda Kazarian's painting is abstract and devoid of waffle, and it is based on the idea of repetition. It derives from a few choices which define how to embark on a piece of painting: a gesture, a support, a format, a material. The absence of any rhetoric does not mean the absence of any content, as there is a subject of the painting.   

Aïda Kazarian is Armenian and she doesn't mention the genocide, since her childhood was marked by silence about that question. And yet, when you think of it, her works are reminiscences, of the emotions felt in the face of death. journeys, births, moments of reunion. When the artist presents a new work, she often relates what happened, the happy or unhappy accident behind her desire to paint.   

In 1997, the first work done entirely without any tool, with her fingers, was dedicated to a deceased friend, then given to his girlfriend. The list of paintings bearing some connection with death is a long one. Her logbook is an endless battle to prolong life, illuminated with immaculate, iridescent colours, daring to use pink, the entire spectrum of light. On the support chosen (canvas, lead, roll of canvas, cake carton, wood…) a little tune remains, infinitely modulated, echoing certain phrases heard in the quartets of Tigran Mansourian, or in the rhythms of liturgical language restored by Komitas.

A desire for life so strong that it makes light of everything and infringes rules with a child's joy. Aïda Kazarian paints using actual gold or golden cake doilies, not making any distinctions. Her world is that of icons, whatever the support or the medium. The images she produces are concentrates of emotion, in which the reflection of natural light is always a vital actor. Her painted works need shadow slowly to emerge, then become revealed in broad daylight, when the sun reaches its zenith.

Alexandre Vanautgaerden, 2019


About my work

For several years, my work has consisted of a series of paintings, generally in square format, on which I have developed an « all over » effect obtained by a methodical repetition of imprints. I lay down the paint regularly at the rhythm of my breath within the limits of my physical endurance. This contact (touch of pressure) is repeated, untiringly back and forth, from right to left, and from left to right, dot per dot, just like a woven oriental carpet. I grew up in the midst of oriental rugs and, perhaps they have subconsciously led to a pictural writing.

Besides the actual gesture of the making, my work also presents a duality between paint and its support which reveals itself as an oscillation, a confusion and sometimes even an inversion of the revealed/unrevealed, positive/negative, above/under oppositions. In the choice of the materials, I am simultaneously attracted by the visual and tactile aspect. The support induces the work-painting, it has its own presence, it dictates, in a way, its own rules. Specific effects can derive from the combination of these materials - support and paint - (i.e.: the instability and the malleability of the lead, the fragility and the milky translucidity of the canvas made of « marine polyester », the reflections of the iridescent paint). Those effects belong to the material, already characterising it. Thus, the material introduces the dimension of its intrinsic qualities. But it is never alone: colours (painting, tinting....), tools (sponge, fingers, wind....) and supports (canvas, marine polyester, cotton duck, wood, lead... or different kind of books) are not definable, but define the labour, the work, the painting.

Since the invitation to work in Düsseldorf, my painting took a new turn. I started to unroll the canvas directly on the wall, leaving the edges rolled up. This leaves me a freer choice for presentation according to the space. As art and life are intertwined, my life nourishes all aspects of the process of my work. Therefore, following the « vertigos » that I had last year, I experimented with new forms of prints based on my memory of those sensations.

Aïda Kazarian

(Düsseldorf, 2001. Revised Brussels, 2002 & 2003)