Harut Hovsepyan art is dedicated to the dichotomy of earthly (physical, corporeal) and heavenly (spiritual, unreal).

Taking as a base the classical realistic chiaroscuro drawing and coloristic traditions of the Armenian school of painting (M. Saryan, E. Tatevosian), Harut Hovsepyan has passed through the technique of Divisionism and such movements as Cubism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Fauvism. Being inspired of Paul Cezanne, Albert Marquet, Raoul Dufy, Henri Matisse he has found himself in a combination of Armenian coloristic with the ornamentation of ancient Armenian miniature-Horans in the Armenian Gospels of the 6th-9th centuries AD (Kasarakan school of miniature) and tempetto of the Х-th-ХI-th centuries to express the priority of the spiritual over the corporeal.

Just like in ancient Armenian gospels, ornamentation carries almost religious semantic load in the artworks by Harut Hovsepyan. The character of his painting depicting sleeping people shows it clearly: there're the large decorative and colorful arrays where the folds of fabrics are marked just by a change in line direction or with a visual break in the pattern, not by shading. It makes the images flat and unreal, following the standards of Byzantine icon painting which prohibited the depiction of "corporeality".

In some of Harut Hovsepyan's artworks elements of the ornament "scatter" and leave large gaps of the light colored foundation of the canvas. It’s a characteristic of his paintings from different series. Visually it increases an effect of "dissolution" of images. This becomes the "light of another world «which artist let to "seep" into the real world. The theme of sleep itself enhances the feeling of unreality here. In essence these paintings turn to become dreams themselves - a transition into another - spiritual extent. Dreams are as theological as icons: in both cases time becomes transcendent: "instantaneous" or inverted, as stated by the priest and scientist Pavel Florensky in his research "Iconostasis". Linguistics confirms it: in many languages a shape of a sleeper and an illusion are being titled by the same one word – a "dream".

Artist statement

Harut Hovsepyan acknowledges that he intended to "program" light and goodness for refugee children, whom he provided shelter for along with their families from Artsakh (a disputed territory in Armenia occupied by Azerbaijan) in his art studio. While engaging in drawing activities with these children, Harut discovered that children do not have idea about past or future but only about the present ("instantaneous," "iconic" time, according to P. Florensky). This implies children’s are closer to the spiritual world which explains the brightness of colors in their drawings. "Color is light," says Harut Hovsepyan thus following the steps of the French Impressionists who divided light into the colors of the spectrum, as well theory by Kazimir Malevich, who proclaimed color as light.

Through his art Harut wants to reach the pure source of light within each individual. "When we are born, we are kind. Now, I am on a journey back to childhood, "says artist.

The images of flowers and fruits placed lavishly by Harut Hovsepyan in his paintings in the fields of draperies, hairstyles, at the foundation of canvas unifies all elements of such artworks into a unified "matrix" and becomes a projection of celestial paradise on Earth.

If Impressionists depicted the real world striving to convey the spaciousness of the air, and Malevich with Supremacists searched the way to transcode the earthly human world to the metaphysical through the concepts of techno genesis, physics, and mathematics, Harut Hovsepyan remains in the world of humans and stays on Earth. Here combining the Impressionistic and children's idea on color with a special feeling of time he manifesting by his art in an Impressionistic way, "All things which are revealed by God are the light" (Ephesians, New Testament, 5:13), it means what is not light (equal to color) is not reality.