Hratch Israelian was born in Armenia, 1956.

In 1972 he pioneered a new painting technique.

This painting technique is a replica of technologies developed by the Industrial Revolution.

Why Industrial revolution? Because the new shapes and surfaces, that came out of the Industrial Revolution, have composed the cultural landscape of the 20th century.

If we want to see the fingerprints of the 20th century culture, we have this paintings technique for it.

Technological transformations at the beginning of the 20th century sparked the spirit of modernity. While modern painting explored ways, to align itself with the dynamics of the time, the painting process remained technically unexplored, throughout the century.

We have to go back 600 years, to find the last technical innovations, in the history of painting. Back then, at the absence of camera and electronic communication, ‘painting was the main generator of social symbols’. People sow broader world through painting and they learn how to live in it, by adopting new ideas and values.

Today mass media achieves more, with more advance tools. It’s armed with cameras and computers. The practical potentials of these tools generated universal efforts and resources, in past 160 years of development. Parallel to their practical use cameras and computers created their own masterpieces of art.

Guided by these same economic and aesthetic principals, can we reinvent the painting process? If yes, how to use our hands and the sticky paint, to compete with magical technologies of our time? Let say, we succeed, can painting regain its old power by this?

This painting technique showing us, that a humble, hand-controlled process, with the use of same paint, is able to achieve great production speed, extremely low cost, unlimited size and the high quality that cameras and computers have not yet achieved in there ultimate visual images.

Hratch lives and works in Los Angeles since 1980.

www.artabus.com/hratch/