Hagop Najarian

Styles change but art remains. For Hagop Najarian,  his move from figurative to abstract to a more hybrid body of work is all about vibrant color and a dancing morph of figurative form into geometric abstracts. While his current body of work on display in his Bendix Building studio is just such a choreography, the change really showed itself in a December 2021 exhibition at Launch gallery.

“Home Turf at Launch LA was a great opportunity for me to synthesize a lot of the ideas that I have been working with for the past decade. Home Turf meant going back to my art making roots and expanding on the formal and conceptual aspects as they relate to the work. Incorporating my technical advancements with my art historical influences. A synthesis of my visual DNA,” Najarian says.

While he began his art career painting more realistic figurative narratives for decades, in 2014, he decided to “not paint imagery, but study color, light, composition and application of paint through the format of abstraction. I think that now the synthesis happens in my current work because of the mark making and gestural forms that happened in my abstract work would almost always relate to the formal things I do when painting the figure: the curve and overlap of forms, the division of space by light and color.” He adds “With the abstract work, I specifically focused on color and sound. I made direct connections to volume, speed, texture, flow and fracture using different musical genres of Classical, Jazz, Punk, Reggae and how they translated to the emotional impact of color.”

Najarian is also a musician, finding painting and music somewhat interchangeable influences. His work at the Launch exhibition was created during the quarantined portion of our ongoing pandemic, a dark time indeed, when he says he “hoped to bring some optimism to the viewer by having the figures supporting each other in a composition made of a fractured environment. The color in the painting actually started from a trip to Palm Springs where those mesmerizing sunsets happen that glow with blue violet/ orange symphonies. I loved the tranquility of that peaceful nature setting as a backdrop to the crumbling human interaction. As the painting progressed, I enjoyed watching the colors and images transform and purposefully using gray as my unifying element.”

Those colors, combined with his palpable joy in drawing and painting his figuartive naratives define a large portion of his work, but so does “allowing myself to use the lessons of abstraction and emotive color from previous abstract paintings as an environment for the figures.”

His loved for painters such as Giotto and Michelangelo is also embedded in his work, for which his process is to “make many drawings and gouache paintings to provide variations of the outcome. I will have a theme or idea on what I want to say, but the paintings are live activities for me. I allow the structural changes and developments to determine the final outcome. So, I may have the main composition in mind, but I will keep moving things around on the canvas with each painting session until it feels done.”

According to Najarian “The Home Turf series really opened new doors to my visual vocabulary and continues to fuel the work that I am making now.”

The artist is also currently an integral part of three art collectives: Durden and Ray, Museum Adjacent, and High Beams. From community and opportunity to inspiration for installation and performance based work, Najarian keeps busy. “I curated three shows in 2020 with Durden and Ray which were all amazing experiences through a time of pandemic. Cautious Optimism I co- curated with Brian Thomas Jones and Curtis Stage , which invited artists that were making work through the pandemic to keep art alive. During the summer when the gallery was at a dry spell, we were fortunate that the members of Durden and Ray allowed us to curate a fundraiser show for the artists that lost their studios and life’s work in fire that destroyed the Little Tokyo Arts Complex. With the invaluable help of Stephanie Sheerwood, Katie Shanks and Noel Madrid, we hosted a three day fundraiser in the Durden and Ray gallery, generating over $12,000 in sales that went directly to the artists from the Little Tokyo Arts Complex.”

And then there was High Beams #3 Laser Snake held in the Bendix parking lot, where he says “I collaborated on ‘Visual and Musical DNA’ with my daughter playing live music, while my two fellow artists Tom Dunn from Durden and Ray and Surge Witron from Museum Adjacent painted live on a clear vinyl canvas in front of us until it filled up with imagery during our performance.”

More recent was High Beams #5 Night Moves rooftop event at the Bendix building, for which Museum Adjacent participated with an 8 x 8 foot free-standing wall that was a ”ZOOM Meeting.” And for the Carl Baratta, Max Presneil, and David Wiesenfeld helmed B-LA Connect, just last month, Najarian co-curated an exhibition on the 6th floor as a pop-up.

He says he most wants people to know that he is, above all else, “a story teller, a communicator, a humanist. At best we all want our work to be a true reflection of who we are. I hope that viewers who see the work and don’t know me can get a sense of my interests in color, joy, my humor and celebrating life. I think that viewers who do know me would say that I am in the work.”

Balancing his visual art with his music is important to Najarian, who describes the two types of art in this way: “Painting in the studio is a private act that we share with the public when we hang it on a wall. As a musician, I love composing and recording music, but playing it live is the most validating confirmation, which is very hard to do in painting. So the live act of painting becomes the recorder for the performance that we share with the public. I think I am at a place where the work is at a good balance for me of my love of music making and art making.”

Using color to amplify the emotional impact of his narrative, he says that regardless of whether the work is figurative or abstract, “It is that element of surprise and live painting that I enjoy most…our sense of memory, our history and life experiences are always visible in our work. As an Armenian immigrant growing up in La Mirada, the colors, smells and sounds from my house made an impactful foundation on me that I still see every time I start a painting. We are who we are thanks to our youth.”

Above image courtesty of Leah Shane Dixon; Brand exhibition

Currently, you can view some of Najarian’s prolific works at the group exhibition Abstract Generations at the Brand Library in Glendale.

• Genie Davis; photo images, Genie Davis, except as noted