Armenian Reporter:

A walk in the park

The Cafesjian Sculpture Garden

Published: Friday October 30, 2009 in Cafesjian Center for the Arts

“Fernando Botero’s Roman Warrior has quickly become a favorite for naughty young girls to stand beside him and have a picture taken” (1985–86, bronze). Vincent Lima

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A walk in the park

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Yerevan - Pride strolling in grand vistas and soaring stone is fine, but being happy walking among fragrant flowers in an inviting park that smiles back at you is more felicitous.

Felicity is what has happened to urban architect Alexander Tamanyan's own park at Yerevan's soaring Cascade when it embraced the Cafesjian Sculpture Garden. High culture, the Cafesjian collection in the park seems to tell us, can also speak softly and be fun for the young – and also for the not too old.

Come take a walk in the park and let's talk about what we see.

Take the Fernando Botero Cat that holds sway at the corner of the park. This South American sculptor's cat is all the cats you have ever seen compressed into one self-satisfied feline. It is a cat that would take a whole sofa for a seat in your house and not be bothered if you had to sit on the floor. It is truly a contented cat.

Discovering what this means is part of the fun.

Not all contented cats are the same. Some can be friendly, in a superior way. Others, totally aloof. This one is very special. When you look closely, you see it has shaved off its whiskers. A cat's whiskers are a vital part of its feeling of the world in which it must live. This cat is disconnected from such feelings, and acts totally privileged. Whether you like him or not, he doesn't care; your opinion doesn't matter. In fact, you don't matter, and he sticks out his tongue at you.

Not too long ago in New York City, a fine collection of Botero sculpture was on loan for a season and placed on Park Avenue, one artwork on every cross-road in the park, street after street. Never did New York City seem more culturally exciting. Now Yerevan also has its Boteros.

Directly across the flowerbeds is Martin Lowe's prancing little horse. It is as playful as the cat is aloof. The horse could start a dialogue with Ara Alekyan's four-footed creations in Yerevan's public squares. Both sculpt with a blowtorch. Alekyan seems to create his works in long, sensitive lines with a steel pen, Lowe with a short brush and color. Alekyan is spare, powerful, evocative; Lowe is closer to the toy box on a sunny afternoon.

Barry Flanagan's creations seem related to animated cinema, not unlike Walt Disney with his Mickey Mouse. Here he gives us a jaunty hare. It is a hare that like a comic-strip mouse can carry us along on crazy adventures more easily than the human figure, projecting and sharing exaggerated emotions to which we can give a delighted response: love, hate, fear, more importantly, our silliness, and best of all, our feelings of triumph and satisfaction. Before us is a hare posing as a boxer on an anvil and a hare leaping over a bell.

We come closest to the circus with Jim Unsworth's elephant emerging from a house it could never have fit into in the first place.

The elephant is so dignified an animal and this is so amusedly ridiculous, it may actually be profound! Indeed, it may be.

Unsworth's elephant stands on a brightly colored, festive circle suggesting one of the rings in a three-ring circus. That an elephant could be contained in such a small house would be pure circus magic, and one can almost see the laughing clowns as it emerges. But at another level there is the belief strongly held in India that our whole world symbolically rests on the back of an elephant. Now look at it again with that belief. The "house of the world" is in deep trouble. What we are witnessing is a moment before fatal disaster.

Returning to the human form and what is undoubtedly the most beautiful artwork in the park, we stand before the paired abstractions of Lynn Chadwick. Moving beyond basic organic shapes of male and female, he looks toward the cultural in clothed modern human forms and finds a provocative geometry of fresh symmetries and harmonies.

His is a geometry that expands our perspectives. His male and female are perfectly paired, equally balanced and poised, elegant in their simplicity, friendly to the viewer. And while there are subtly decisive differences between them, rather than separating the pair, the differences enrich and enhance.

Happily the garden contains three Chadwicks: the loving geometry of the Two Watchers, the textured harmonies of Sitting Figures, and the dynamic symmetries of Stairs. We also find another provocative Fernando Botero, the Roman Warrior.

The Roman Warrior wears no pants and his exposure is his most obvious fact. He has quickly become a favorite for naughty young girls to stand beside him and have a picture taken.

His legs are massive columns, his shoulders broad; he is wide of chest and gut and is very big and bare of butt, while his male member seems to charge forward. But it is the size of his shield that defines his nakedness. It is half the size of his hat. It emphasizes the enormous bareness of his flesh and his almost total vulnerability.

He may believe he is ready for war and all the vicissitudes of life. Yet what he evokes is not fear of him but for him. We are frightened for him. He is alarmingly vulnerable. What Botero has done is turn our concept of the warrior around.

The Roman Warrior is in dialogue with all the heroic statues and all the sculpted forms of favored poets, composers, and artists that grace, warm, and beautify the parks of Yerevan. The reality is, take off the thin fabric of their pants and he is one with them, for how many of the great ones were truly less vulnerable against the powers that would beat them down and against whom they stood up? What did Yeghishe Charents have much beside his naked self when he got up in the morning to fight the good fight?

Botero has given us a portrait of ourselves. Our strength lies not in a forged metal shield but in basic courage in meeting challenges, and our forward thinking despite vulnerability.

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