The Speed of a Car Standing Still: René Staud and Cristian Korn at Tamara Hovhannisyan’s Carmel Exhibition

At Gallery Milmar International, René Staud’s automotive photographs and Cristian Korn’s abstract paintings occupied one room. Many of Staud’s pictures began as commissions. They had long since outgrown them. The exhibition was initiated and curated by Tamara Hovhannisyan, the Armenian poet, art historian, and gallerist.

AUGUST 17, 2026, ASHOT POGHOSYAN, MONTEREY, CA, YEREVAN ONLINE Mag. US CORRESPONDENT

On August 15, 2026, rare cars moved through Carmel. It was Monterey Car Week. The next morning, the world’s most expensive, rarest, and best-preserved cars would gather on the clipped lawn at Pebble Beach for the 75th Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. For those few days, the peninsula was a museum in motion. Cars long out of production appeared beside one-offs with no second example anywhere.

At six that evening, “Dance of Soulful Illusions” opened at Gallery Milmar International.

Outside, the cars moved. Inside, they stood still in photographs. The speed stayed in the frame.

René Staud stops a car so its shape can be seen. Cristian Korn lets shape go into color. Staud works with light and metal. Korn works with line, paint, and marks erased and brought back. Their work does not look alike. Side by side, the difference sharpens.

Tamara Hovhannisyan brought them into the same room.

In an exclusive interview with Yerevan Online Mag., she said:

“This exhibition brings together two very talented artists. One is the world-renowned photographer René Staud. The other is Cristian Korn, whom I have worked with for twenty-five years. I consider him one of the finest abstract expressionists working today.

“It is beautiful to see two creative people draw closer through art. There is a human, emotional, and professional connection here. This meeting has been a wonderful experience. We hope there will be more events like it in the years ahead.”

Hovhannisyan was speaking about the connection between them. There was no obvious resemblance. In the room, you could see it.

The Artificial Sky

René Staud was born in Stuttgart in 1951. He was fifteen when he sold his first photographs. That was about sixty years ago. He says the number plainly. No anniversary in his voice.

“I started taking photographs very young,” Staud told Yerevan Online Mag. “By fifteen, I had already sold my first pictures. You could say I have been working independently for about sixty years.”

When Staud began, the standard car photograph followed a formula: a beautiful car, mountains, an open road, a sunset. The car in the middle. It was not enough for him.

In the early 1980s, he brought the car into the studio. Small lamps broke up the bodywork. Polished metal flared. Curves separated, and the car lost its unity.

A polished body is a large mirror. It returns every light around it. Put one lamp in the wrong place and the shape breaks apart.

Staud built Magicflash®, a luminous surface made to the dimensions of a car. It hung overhead and worked like an artificial sky. The light did not strike the body. It ran over it, from roof to fender, from door to glass. One curve ended. Another began. Developed in 1983, the system gave studio automotive photography a new language.

Light is Staud’s material. The car is where you can see it work.

In his studio photographs, the world around the car is gone. No road. No driver. No traffic. No destination. The body remains: proportion, weight, shine. The machine stands there as an industrial sculpture.

Staud photographs a car as he might photograph a face. A person does not have to smile for a portrait. The person stands before the light, and the light finds the face: its structure, age, strength, fatigue. Staud’s cars do not perform for the camera. They stand there and show how they are built.

Commercial work and art do not separate cleanly in his photography. Many pictures began as commissions. Once the client’s work was done, Staud photographed the same car for himself. Those frames went into his private archive. There the car was no longer merchandise. It became the shape, taste, and technical ambition of its time.

“What you see here is my own selection of photographs of different makes,” he told Yerevan Online Mag. “I worked a great deal for Porsche, and for a while for Aston Martin and Maserati. When I had a car at my disposal for a commercial commission, I also made pictures for myself. The collection grew that way, year after year.”

In the archive, price did not decide. Access did. Some cars stayed in his studio for only a few hours and never came back. There are prototypes, cars released from private collections, examples kept locked in manufacturers’ archives.

A museum preserves the car. A photograph preserves the way an age looked at it. Its taste stays in the frame: what it called beautiful, how it imagined speed, what it believed a car had to do with freedom, wealth, and danger.

The archive holds desire beside the metal.

“My dream is to build the largest photographic archive of the automobile’s golden age,” he said. “When I see a rare car at auction, I try to find out whether I can add it to my collection. I want to pass the archive on to future generations. The cars that have survived from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s have great cultural value. They are not simply means of transportation. They are works of art.”

The archive is unfinished. After sixty years, he is still talking about the next car.

The Object Left in Color

Light behaves differently on Cristian Korn’s canvases. It does not slide. It sinks into the paint, comes through an opening of white, sometimes disappears under thick color.

Korn was born in Pergamino, Argentina, in 1960. He studied in Buenos Aires, Italy, and Stuttgart. Willi Baumeister’s ideas and Adolf Hölzel’s thinking on color shaped his development. He later worked in Stuttgart as an art lecturer and a specialist in museum education.

His path led from figurative art toward abstraction, but he never erased the object completely. Traces of places, bodies, and objects he has seen sometimes rise through the paint, then disappear again. Korn does not paint what he saw. He paints what it left in him.

At the opening, he looked at the people gathered around him and said:

“I feel very good today. There are many people, interesting conversations, beautiful colors.”

He kept it short. The same three things – people, talk, color – are in the paintings.

Korn’s colors do not keep a polite distance. They touch, crowd one another, pull back. A black line tries to hold the shape. Paint crosses it and escapes the edge. Under the movement, a structure holds.

The drawing never disappears. Graphite, charcoal, or dark paint stays underneath like a skeleton. Color covers it, cuts it, opens it again. The canvas holds. There is a score beneath the improvisation.

Calling Korn an abstract expressionist does not quite cover him. Historical Abstract Expressionism is tied to the American school of the mid-twentieth century. Korn’s road ran through Argentina, Italy, and Germany. Latin American warmth of color rests on European structure. The German color tradition remains, along with the memory of academic drawing and a musical pulse. The lyricism rests on a firm structure.

He does not ask the viewer to name the object. He takes it to the point where form has no name yet, though its presence can already be felt. In his work, color does not illustrate a story. Color acts. One field comes forward. Another falls back. A line orders the surface for a moment. Then paint breaks the order.

Asked by Yerevan Online Mag. what his art was about, he said:

“My art is about sensations, emotions, and certain thoughts. I try to bring them out from within, transform them in the way I can, and make visible what I feel.”

Staud’s line begins as a reflection in metal. Korn’s begins in the hand. Staud’s surface is polished. Korn’s keeps the scratch, the depth of paint, the mark left by erasure. In Staud’s work, wrong light can break the car’s form. In Korn’s, an unfinished line can hold a whole canvas.

We also asked Korn about his dream.

“To be happy,” he said. “Art gives me happiness. And when a work succeeds, it creates a special form of communication between me and the viewer.”

He did not mention museums, prices, or a place in history. He said: to be happy.

Between Two Artists

In the room, the title “Dance of Soulful Illusions” is put to the test. Staud’s car stands still and still carries speed. In Korn’s canvas, the object may be gone, but its trace stays.

Beside the polished metal in Staud’s photographs, Korn’s paint keeps the scratch and the pressure of the hand. The works do not merge. The tension between them remains.

Hovhannisyan built the exhibition on that difference. Stuttgart appears in both biographies. What joins them in the room is the way they work. Staud draws emotional pressure from material form. Korn pushes feeling into material: paint, line, surface.

Hovhannisyan is a poet. Poetry, her training in art history, and years spent working with artists have sharpened her eye. She knows that two works can sometimes explain each other without a long text on the wall.

Her 2015 collection “I Am a Woman, I Am an Island” was her fifth book. In 2018, the poetry collection “The Soul of Age” was presented at the Writers’ Union of Armenia.

Over twenty-five years, Hovhannisyan has written and edited books and catalogues on Korn’s art. In 2018, the German publisher Kohlhammer issued the 156-page volume “Cristian Korn: Paintings,” with texts by Hovhannisyan and several art historians. The relationship now has a page count, a publisher, and a bibliographic record.

Gallery Milmar International has operated in Carmel since 1997. It mainly represents European art, but its rooms have also been open to Armenian, Latin American, and East Asian artists.

In 2015, Hovhannisyan reduced the work of a gallerist to one sentence: “After all, you are not selling cheese. You are selling a work of art.”

Behind the blunt comparison is a long job. Choose the artist. Study the work. Write. Publish. Put the work before people who do not yet know the name. Own the wrong choice too. Her twenty-five years with Korn give that job a concrete shape.

Here, a fine eye is measured in work: research, text, catalogue, years spent with the same artist.

In Carmel, her Armenian presence needs no sign. You see it in the work. In this small, demanding town on the Monterey Peninsula, an Armenian woman has spent decades bringing different schools, languages, and biographies into one room. She presents European, Armenian, Latin American, and East Asian artists there. The Armenian name enters that circulation through work, taste, and responsibility.

There is reason to be proud of an Armenian woman doing this work across the ocean. She does not wait for the world to become curious about us. She enters the international art world and works: mounts an exhibition, presents an artist, edits a book, brings the viewer before the work. Then she starts the next one.

Each of the three put the wish in plain words. René Staud wants to pass his archive of the automobile’s golden age to future generations. Cristian Korn wants to be happy and to find a connection with the viewer through his work. Tamara Hovhannisyan wants meetings like this to continue in the years ahead.

Outside, cars kept moving through Carmel.

Inside, one stayed still.

And it was the fastest.