Zareh – Transforming Universal Issues and Awareness into an Artwork

LA Splash
By Ditta Triwidianti

Zareh began to draw at a very young age. As a child, he use to draw
animals, portraits and other subjects. Drawing or painting has always
been an outlet that makes him feel alive. Art is a temple that he has
created in which his soul dances freely, his imagination is welcomed
and his desires and emotions are expressed. The movements of his hand
when he draws, help him to release and transform his energy and his
thoughts. These through pencils, paints and media, in turn, transform
and become images of his artwork. Some artwork contours are blended,
smudged and multiplied, creating a feeling of motion and a
relationship with the surrounding.

Drawing or painting has always been an outlet that makes him feel
alive

Born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1956, he moved with his family to Lebanon in
1963. During the Lebanese Civil War of the 1970s, Zareh studied fine
art at Beirut’s Al Kaslik University. The atrocities of the war,
followed by the breakdown of tolerance and civility between quarreling
communities, had a profound effect on the sensitive young artist. What
he witnessed in those years would start to define the core concerns
and attributes of his art, expressed at turns through sorrow,
apprehension, and explosive outrage at manifestations of social and
political injustice.

After moving to the United States in 1983, Zareh dedicated himself to
create his artwork with much of his output designed to raise public
awareness of universal issues such as environmental degradation,
globalism and its dire consequences for disenfranchised societies, and
human-rights violations. The memories and influences of the past come
to life in his work. These very influences interact with his present
experiences and continually change.

His work conveys feelings, imagination, communication, struggle,
relief and his marks of existence

Many of Zareh’s critically acclaimed exhibitions, such as “The Red
Trees of the Armenian Genocide” and “Marry the Priest,” have been
featured in the U.S. media, including the Los Angeles Times, La
Opinion, KTLA, and others. Some projects were performance pieces,
which were publicly displayed on the streets of Greater Los Angeles
area.

His artwork have been publicly displayed in Greater Los Angeles area

“Existence is a collective experience. The feeling of existence is a
sense of being different. Differences engender reaction and reaction
leads to change. Life is the change. Changes bring awareness of time
and movement. Differences enable us to compare and measure. Measure
and proportion are the logic of mind. Completion and perfection do not
exist. Reality is not absolute, it is relative. Art is an expression
relative to environment and period.” Zareh also enjoys exploring the
commonality and the differences of living things. He likes to combine,
change and transform them into art. “Sometimes, simplified organic
forms, dots, an outline and geometric forms intricately accompany the
realistic execution of my art.”

Existence is a collective experience

Zareh’s artwork is an act in which time and transformation seek
existence in movement, change, sequence, repetition, relationship and
resemblance. His work conveys feelings, imagination, communication,
struggle, relief and his marks of existence. “My art on canvas has
evolved and transcended to an outlet using our ever growing media, the
issues of social injustice compelled me to utilize my expression of
art as a voice to the multitude.” added him.

To find most of his artworks and more information check on Zareh
website. Zareh also make separate Facebook for his Portrait artworks
that and for his Non-Portrait artworks.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress