Arthur Sakhkalyan received an engineering education, but since 2003 he has been mainly engaged in art photography, as well as furniture-making and eco-tourism. From the very early stages of his photographic practice, Sakhkalyan was taken with the aesthetic possibilities of classical, late-modernist art photography. Using mostly large-format analogue and Polaroid cameras, the young artist has focused his attention on genres of landscape, portraiture and the nude. The subject matter that is of most interest to him is that, which is usually left unnoticed and ignored in our daily hustle. His landscapes are often free from significant narrative details and picturesque elements. Photographed from the edge of the highway or in nondescript villages, these views do not conform to staid clichés, but instead reveal entirely different aspects of the Armenia’s nature. The photographer's camera records the rough and severe, but also melancholic impact of human interventions into the natural environment. These scenes are full of ideological tension, in which the traces of technological progress seem to have already been overpowered by the natural elements. Like the romantic paintings of 19th-century German artist Kaspar David Friedrich, Sakhkalyan’s photographs point to the instability of our civilisation in the face of nature’s powerful forces. 

Following the trajectory of 1960s American ‘subjective’ photography by Minor White and Harry Calahan, Sakhkalyan also observes humanity in its perpetually fleeting condition. In his lyrical portraits and nudes, the photographer emphasises the body’s fragility and uncovers the delicate, often unacknowledged threads of everyday human communication. What these photographs - masterfully constructed in a palette of subdued pastel tones - ultimately bring forth, are the liminal sensory spaces that are located beyond linguistic and cultural definitions.

Vigen Galstyan, 2016