“Contextually and statistically, Nicogosian’s artwork is abstract. But when we look carefully, insistently, with the “third eye” and we notice that the canvas becomes gradually fading and it becomes crystal clear that in its “flesh” exists forms, suggestions, texts. The “Abstract feeling” persists only if we place ourselves outside the communication act. In this painting, the desire to scream and to be silent come to terms and live together. They stay together like life and its shadow. 

We can speak here, undoubtedly, about an art of trauma, of a perpetual sunset, sedimented, gloomy, sepulchral. Perhaps the titles of the canvases clear in a more explicit manner certain messages or backgrounds, but I prefer to read these artworks at the strict level of iconography, where subsists the pure gesture, the glaze, the chromatic magma, the calligraphy, the instinctive brush stroke.  

I try to place myself (and I don’t know if i succeed) in this totalising speech of the artist. My mind is swarming with associations. From this point of view, the Gulag perceived as a totalitarian night. On this ground I also sense the tragedy of Armenians slaughtered by the people with whom they lived for centuries. I also can see here the white peak of Ararat, here is the broken and conquered Caucasus by countless oppressions, here is an entire drama of those silenced and then left censored for ever. In the cold of ignoring. In perpetual pain. 

I cannot be less gravely, since this artist depicts only images of pain, installed maybe forever or maybe waiting for the end of the time. This is the reason all we see in these paintings is of tragic nature, thrilling and frightening. They are “crystalized” forms in inner painting.”