Statements
Helen Harrison, NY Times....."In contrast, the huge grimacing head by Miss Soorikian's mother, Diana Soorikian, distills all the anguish of a Munch scream. The head hovers like a restless ghost, eyes glazed and teeth bared,in what is obviously not a literal rendition of outward appearance. The probing and revelation that such a portrait represents cannot fail to move the viewer."
Critic Byron Coleman....''Soorikian's images are brave for their very lack of sentimentality; beautiful for their strong delineation of form and elegantly painted, with their combination of dark and strident hues, articulate strokes and well placed drips that dribble like tantrum tears down the authoritatively articulated surfaces of her canvasses."
Gallery Director Vernita Nemec...."Soorikian clearly loves paint and painting in the ways that artists did in the past. Undistracted by computers, cameras and other more mechanical tools she is not afraid to upset the viewer with emotion and toughness in the seriousness of her brushwork and the natural accidents of painting. In Soorikian's painting, regardless of the subjects she chooses, looms the raw energy of Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning and Alice Neel, all rolled into one painter who rarely misses."
"The human body, without narrative or locale, dominates my painting. I welcome the struggle between the opposites of figuration and and the imperatives of paint. The boy babies are from my "Putti" series. Putti, the angels who appear endearingly in many sacred paintings of the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque eras, were idealized in their beauty and innocence. My babies are the antithesis of those cherubim; mine assert, demand and control. Crouching in feral anticipation, they hint of the men they might become. The scale of these paintings is larger than life, hopefully capturing the angst of expression and the tension of posture."
"The modular paintings consist of panels fitting together to form an implied whole. Each unit depicts an image, simplified and totemic in its isolation, yet integral to the whole. The viewer enters this maze from any single unit, moving in chess like fashion. Unlike chess there are no rules of the game; one can move, pause, jump as one wishes. The subject matter of these installations comes from the recesses of memory or the preoccupations of the moment."