Evgenia Saré

Born in 1959 in Yerevan, Armenia, Evgenia Sarkissian (Saré) graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts in her hometown. Along with her job as a set designer (over 40 productions in theater and 4 in cinema), she explored several techniques to give life to her characters, ranging from ceramics to bronze sculptures, through etching and monotype. Since her moving to Paris in 1991, she devoted herself almost entirely to oil painting. Her works are in many private collections and museums.

 

even when I have no pencil or paintbrush in my hand, every look, every move, every word, every passerby, everything around me fill up my painter's treasury. I refine my characters, I take away the malice, the bitterness, the gray veil of daily hassles, and they continue their life in my paintings, in serenity and happiness.” – Saré

 

The atmosphere, characters, costumes, and colors she creates in her paintings often give the impression of being prepared like a stage. The geometry of the arrangements on the canvas, the use of empty spaces, and the costumes establish a plane where the figures can step onto the stage, hold their poses, and remain legible. She emphasizes to the viewer that these spaces function like emptied-out, theatrical, and slightly uncanny stage sets, thereby bringing faces and bodies to the forefront.

 

In these constructed scenes, the Zyuziki appear: Saré’s recurring cast of players, the figures who are the subjects of her paintings. With round physiognomies that sometimes falter, these strange yet affectionate beings return to the canvases like a large family encountered in different scenes. The artist describes them as a “tremendous family” with human values and measures that are different from ours yet still recognizable; thus, even as a parallel community is formed, the viewer often has the chance to see something of themselves. The Zyuzikis form pairs and small groups, carrying unexpected hats, accessories, animals, or costume-like elements, behaving according to their own customs; their tone is not cruel but grotesque-joyful, allowing satire to suddenly merges into compassion.

 

Due to the technique she employs, Saré works in a slow and classical manner. She has moved between engraving/etching on Plexiglas, monotype, and oil painting; often constructing a surface by layering and adding transparent varnishes (glazes) over a delicate drawing, a process that requires drying time. In her works on paper, refined pastel tones and transparent washes “humanize” the grotesque; in oil painting, thousands of small brushstrokes can create the effect of a polished skin that captures the light. Saré’s statement that she deliberately chooses the 15th–16th century technique, which “allows time for reflection and does not accept haste,” also signals a stance against today’s reactive image culture.

 

From the perspective of art history, Saré’s works draw inspiration from the grotesque and carnivalesque European tradition, stretching from Bosch and Bruegel to Callot, Daumier, and even Goya; but she uses this legacy not to deride, but to humanize. Her “grotesque realism” pierces through empty ideals of beauty, allowing forms to arrive swollen, crooked, and knotted, and then revealing beauty within the logic of that very existence.