“Tokatlian is an impressive artist whose sculptures inhabit a magical place in which form and emotion mix. Tokatlian's imagination is sympathetic in the best sense of the world; he embraces humanity in its widest meaning, incorporating but also transcending the disturbances of man. This gives his art its imaginative meaningfulness.”

— JONATHAN GOODMAN
Editor and writer based in N.Y. He writes for several publications, including Art in America, Art on Paper, Sculpture, and Art Asia Pacific

“One does not leave an exhibition of Raffi Tokatlian's sculptures unscathed. His works engrave themselves on the spirit, leaving an indelible stamp on the soul. Sometimes, they can even be "disturbing", in the sense that Braque gave the world when he claimed that “Art is meant to disturb”. All things considered, however, Tokatlian’s world-with his fantastic visions and tormented bodies being reminiscent of the world of Gibran; his frightening creatures, hybrids, evoking those in the works of Jerome Bosch- is in no way oppressive. His sculptures have a fluid, ethereal quality that escape the substance from which they emanate. They are a hymn to life, symbolized by the primordial or comic egg, by the primal shell; they are a return to genesis both in the sense of origin and of birth. They are also a hymn to woman, both lover and mother. And when they represent the human body, they reveal, without expressing these emotions violently, a combination of passion, energy, and sensuality.

Resolutely anchored in modernity, abounding with allegorical and mythological symbols, Tokatlian’s works are an invitation to reflect on our destiny while enchanting us with their harmony. We sense the quest for movement, the concern for self-expression, and the desire to capture every shiver of life such talent leaves one speechless with admiration.”

— ALEXANDRE NAJJAR
Counselor at the Ministry of Culture, member of the UNESCO cultural commission in Beirut, Lebanon.

“The artist is willing to shake us up, intent on awakening us to see something both strange and real. Tokatlian is a sculpture who gives us visions, dream-like images, which carry within them suffering and wisdom, the fantastic and the real, all made manifest in human form.”

— JOHN MENDELSON
Art critic and writer for Art Net and Internet Magazine

”Casting the figure in bronze is an act that ties the sculptor to an age-old tradition. But Raffi Tokatlian's sculptures flout tradition at every turn.

To comprehend a work of his you must invariably see it from several angles.
But it must be emphasized that these creatures of Tokatlian's imagination, fraught with symbolic, religious, mythological, and more arcane resonance, delirious in the knowledge that their tribulations are part of a greater lesson.”

—PETER FRANK
Senior curator at the Riverside Art Museum, art critic for Angeleno Magazine and the L.A. Weekly, and past editor Visions art quarterly, and art critic for the Village Voice and the SOHO weekly news in N.Y.

”Raffi is making very unique surreal sculptures that very strong enigmatic, emotional, and visually just beautiful, while also having a playful mischievous side. Many artists creating similar sculptures tend to be extremely kitschy, redundant of many other artists, boring in their themes and just not all that interesting.”

— ROBERT CURCIO
Private dealer, curator, collector's advisor, and cofounder of Scope Art Fair Inc.

”Born from imagination and history, the sculpture of Raffi Tokatlian belong to a double world where earth and sky, sensuality and torment, surrealism and reality, beauty and decay, gentleness and violence, war and peace, live together.
Polished, field and pounced sculptures, sometimes even rough or granulated, meeting questions, turmoil, anxieties, but also the canons of aesthetics, concerns, demands and hopes of the twenty first century.
Here the bronze talks. It talks vehementhly and energetically against oblivion and obsenteeism. It talks about the duty of memory, devastation and the collapse of human values.”

—Edgar Davidian
The Art of Raffi Tokatlian between Imagination and History