Norikian Krikor
Beirut, 1942
The problem with Armenian painting in Lebanon revolves as much around a fantasy of personal or collective identity as about this very identity. It is revealing that all the Armenian refugees in Lebanon shared the same obsession: obtaining an identity card.
Krikor Norikian enrolled in Guvder’s studio after graduating. This apprenticeship gave him a taste for large strokes, giving the impression of drawing on face and every face at the same time. Guvder influenced his drawing and the emblematic style with which he juxtaposed several faces, which features, eyes, nose and lips, gave rhythm to both the reading and the interpretation of the painting.
Perhaps he had no other opportunity but to work within a group of Armenian painters. It was the only frame he knew. Lebanon had seventeen communities that each had their own socio-communal cultural expression, as if painting could only be a community exercise.
Norikian settled in France in 1976. Since then, in his oils and lithographs, he has explored variations on the theme of exile, no longer needing to avert the terror of its repetition. In the late 1960s, he worked on canvases in which the face was conceived as architecture and linked to traditional Armenian architectural forms.
This was his way of giving body to all the absent bodies, while these faces literally did not have a body. His monuments became the lost bodies of all the Armenians.
For the greater part, Armenian painting does feed itself on personal mythologies. It reflects the way in which each Armenian painter bears the separation with the Motherland.
Lebanon, for Norikian, was another lost land, echoing an earlier situation. His rigidity came from an excess of discomfort, from an absolute need to hold on to lithography, perhaps to have the assurance of finding a career wherever he might find himself. But is it only that? It also comes from a concern to master any eventual lack as well as any abundance. It was not about measurement, but about self-defence. Culture was no more than the sign of what had been lost and what would yet continue to be lost.