HRAIR EMERGES AGAIN IN A BURST OF COLOURS

Everything about this exhibition is magical. Starting with the artist's lavish use of colours and icons, which he claims to have "conjured up over a period of time", the thought-provoking masterpieces that have been hung up on the walls and ending at his modern day "keeping pace with today" style work, every piece of art will do its best to take you to a different world. A world where the only things definite, are the artist's dreams.

Although virtually, Hrair draws everytime he speaks. His hands taking and forming definite shapes as the words come flowing out of his mouth, in an English that is punctuated with French. "I was inspired at the beginning of my very long journey in the world of art, by icons and art from the Byzantine era and it has left an indelible impression on my mind. And that's what is really evident in my paintings. The important thing about my work is the colours. I am a colourist, so I make generous use of colour.

But the colours I use don't fight with one another. They never do. There are usually three or four basic colours and the rest are simply shades drawn from the main ones.Even though I began to evolve and create my own style, which makes good use of icons, I have still kept alive the technique that I had adopted initially."

Icons.... plenty of them can be seen on his canvasses. Women, horses (his favourite), flowers, the sun, calligraphy (different from the more practical kind, he says), all of it can be found in abundance, embedded, of course, in colour... the reds, blues, yellows and greens. "Horses are the most wonderful animals on earth. For me, they constitute everything. They are the men, they are the women, they signify life, motion, colour, grace... so many different things in one. It's simply fantastic and they have always been a major part of my work and the paintings exhibited during this show too have a lot of horses painted across the canvasses. Through these horses, I am able to express my feelings and what I think. I feel people have forgotten how to dream and I am glad that looking at my paintings, gives them a medium to start dreaming oncce again."

But horses aren't the only thing to stand out in each of his canvasses. Evolution means, that Hrair has concoted and assigned different meanings to the various objects and subjects that are part of his work. His attention to detail and the symbolic nature of each of his subjects is simply astonishing. The sun, he says, is the giver of life and hence, "I include it in paintings, where the undertones have a high dose of optimism and hope running throughout the colours and forms."

Hrair is of Armenian origin. But having been born and brought up in Lebanon and having received a formal French education, make him more French than anything else. He is, however, proud of his culture which combines the three. Thanks to his travels, Hrair boasts of having learnt to speak Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish.

Apart from having studied art at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts (ALBA) in Beirut, Hrair is also a qualified architect and interior designer. But his first and only love, if we might dare to say, is painting. He can't think of anything beyond his colour palettes and canvas. "I have studied architecture and interior designing, but these aren't the things I fancy doing. I don't like working under someone's instructions and I'd rather have things done my way. That's why I prefer painting because it lets me do what I really want to do. I can work more freely and let my mind wander. That's one of the main reasons for the dreaminess, that is ever present in my work. I never work as an interior designer or architect because you're never free like an artist, you are the slave of the customer. I use the knowledge I have to decorate my own house and apartment, or to do up the homes of my friends, but I never work professionally as one."

At 56, Hrair seems content with the path he's been treading for decades. But as soon as he's asked to suggest a name for the collection that will be shown from today, he shows a different side of himself. This baffled Hrair. "This collection is without a name, so we could probably call it Hrair Art, because I haven't painted to any particular theme. There is the modern woman, who's simply playing with the cat and there are a few who are musicians wanting to start showing their finesse on the violins. There is the veiled woman riding upon a majestic looking stallion. Then there's the sun, there are flowers, there's pretty much everything of what I've done in the past here. So it's really difficult to give the exhibition a proper title."

Even with no name, this is an event one should simply not miss.