Book preview - European art development ; by German Michail ; 2007
“Painting let us see things as they once, werewhen they were viewed love” by Paul Valery.
Nugzar Kakhiani
The riskiest experience for an artist is the “eternal theme”. Nugzar Kakhiani (or so it would seem) paints those motives that always have and always will exist. People engaged in absorbing tasks or peaceful and affable conversation. Endearing and diverting, serious or not so serious. He paints sunshine on grass, fruit, flowers etc. He has already amassed great experience, infused with a keen knowledge of classical painterly culture and the art of the early modern period. Most importantly, he is endowed with his own genial, ironic and valiant fantasy. When an artist rates highest of all the simplest things, painted many times over, the main thing becomes his own way of looking at the world, his own “substance of art”, his own plastic intonation.
Kakhiani’s gift is both rare and remarkable. Irony merged in a single whole with precious painterly plasma. Acute motives and individual persons, never crossing into engaging narrative or representational anecdote. The examples in the history of painting are unique, evoking memories of such rare and high names as the seventeenth-century Dutch masters, Honore Daumier, Constation Guys, Jules Pascin…
Kakhiani lists Botticelli, Gauguin and Picasso among his favourite artists. While he is the least of all least of all an imitator, the cult of a faultless, pinpoint line, energetic forms and sharp, modern irony are deeply embedded in his knowledge of the onus of artistic handicraft (he studied at a faculty of artistic metalworks).
His “sacred craft” ability and taste for the definite , the architectonic and the cast completion of forms-all these qualities lend his canvasses astaticism and professional maturity.
Nugzar Kakhiani’s canvasses are full of sharp irony and exalted tenderness. He delights in the comic and grins, looking at what he adores, betraying the mental valour and acute ingenuity of an attentive and the subtle master. Kakhiani’s irony lines not in the depiction of funny faces of situations.\what are ironic and genial are the patches of pure, soft and almost local colours. \seeming to dance and correlated in the most elegant ways, they are remarkably exact in tone. Never breaking the surface of the canvas or creating an illusory space, these scrupulously drawn planes-drawn by an invisible, yet perceptible line-construct the genial relations between the characters. Like music, they do not require words. The less experienced viewer will, of course ,smile and enjoy ,above all ,the subject. The main merit of Kakhiani’s pictures is their ability to dissolve the trivial joviality of the characters and events in art. Their ability to make precious everything touched by his keen eye and penetrating, genial brush.
Kakhiani’s world is inhabited by charming cranks-slightly fabulous, slightly risible and always touching. “Meeting(2005), for example, is very much like a genre scene, yet behind the external humour and simultaneous seriousness of slightly confused characters, there is a profusion pf heart-wrenching, tenderly depicted details-parts and particles, motionless witness of living life, eloquent and expressive in their amusing definiteness. A wealth of psychologist concealed behind the chastity of the experienced and austere brush. Most importantly, all this is subordinated to the single goddess of Painting herself. The faultlessly found values of the intense, magnificently balanced patches of colour. The tender modelling of the forms (as in low relief). The musical, demure (like the situation itself) rhythms of lines. The crepuscular jewel of the vibrating surface of paint. Nugzar Kakhiani is still young- just over fifty, no age at all for an artist! Yet he has already held many exhibitions in Russia, Western Europe and across the ocean. More importantly, he has already created his own painterly world, his own “magic crystal”, his own optics. In his canvasses, he sees and creates a universe full of good, but devoid of empty sentimentality, engagement and salon-like colourfulness. The great and the small, the funny and the touching, the serious and the paltry-everything is dissolved in and transformed by the painting. The artist often smiles, yet never laughs (laughter wounds, while smiling heals: it is not for a painting to raise laughter!)His painting is imbibed with love and this love is expressed with mastery and a rare personal freedom. The “substance of art” always triumphs, allowing the diligent viewer to penetrate the hidden depths of the world, delighting in the magical inflorescences and gracious lines reigning in the pictures painted by the wise and artistic brush of this and the genial sage-Nugzar Kakhiani.
Professor Mikhail German,Member of Liberal Arts Academy and the International Association of Art Critics(AICA),Senior curator, State Russian Museum,St Petersburg.