An art salon, Avetis, opened in Kapan is the first of its kind in the town. It exhibits and offers for sale hand-made art works mainly made from wood.

The art salon’s owner, 42-year-old sculptor Armen Avetis says that he had plans to open such a salon in Kapan for several years, but the community was not ready for it: “They say people here do not understand arts, but you should show it so that they can understand. There is an art gallery in the town, but few even know its location and few visit it.”

Avetis (his name means “good news”) is a self-taught sculptor but is well-known in Kapan. He is a communications engineer by training and used to work for an electricity network. He engaged in sculpture ten years ago. First it was a hobby for him and several years ago he quit his main job in order to engage in sculpturing only.

He mainly works with wood: “I work with stone as well, but it is wood that I like. It sort of talks. You can’t give spirit to a stone, it is merely a dead material and it does only what you tell, and wood can have such places inside it – ornaments, rotten places, so that it tells you – I don’t want to be here.”

The art salon features not only Avetis’s works. He gives an opportunity to young artists in Kapan to bring their works and have them displayed here. Of course, he says, they should have some artistic value in them: “Many think they create something valuable, then let them first convince me that it is valuable. This is in some sense a place to see what others do, make comparisons, develop taste. Let them put theirs next to other works and look at it in order to better evaluate what they did.”

Avetis feels offended when his salon is called a “shop” because he is more interested in displaying than selling. “The day when I don’t come to the salon, I call to the worker and ask how many people have visited rather than how many works have been sold, because I am rather interested in visitors.”