Hrair, Hrair Diarbékirian known as

Beirut, 1946

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Hrair enrolled at ALBA in 1959 where he was the student of Henri Fortier. 

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His work is characterised by a frontal approach to the treatment of the characters, a partitioning of space, and repetition of decorative elements. He painted like a man who had perfectly assimilated technique, with a rapidity linked more to his personality than to a desire to use these elements to deepen his painting and give himself the means of enlarging the vocabulary and plastic data of the canvas. 

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The nature of his work forbade him from meditating through the slow elaboration needed for the intense poetisation of the plastic world, even if he opened a door to these possibilities from time to time, so we would know that he could do it if he wanted to. With him, the sense of an innate naivety, drawn from the traditions of Armenian and Byzantine iconology, evolved in proportion to the exuberant side of his personality.

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It is quite interesting to analyse the way in which Hrair constituted himself as a painter, through a first exhibition that was a failure, but then  a second exhibition at Gallery One which led him to gradually gather a public of collectors. He took part in, and always remained close to, the social whirl of Beirut society, in which the painter did not play the role of a public entertainer, but of a painter, exhibiting in various spaces and hanging his paintings at friends’ houses. He showed a meteoric sensitivity to the forms and tastes for painting, while remaining aware of the easy ways he indulged to for personal reasons. 

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Hrair drew into Byzantine iconography and the history of Armenian miniatures, which distinguished his painting from Academism, but he was their victim when he drew no more than decorative exuberance from them. He exhibited in Beirut at the Alecco Saab Gallery in April 1962, at Gallery One in 1963, 1964 and 1965; at the Phoenicia Hotel in 1964 and 1966 and in 1969 at Gallery L’Antiquaire and the Jadis Gallery.