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Before the white canvas


cameo:
  • Sviatoslav Nikitenko

    cinema:
  • Rustam Khamdamov

    design:
  • Alexander Ermolaev
  • Etienne Boyer
  • Stas Chermensky

    dolls:
  • Ekaterina Manshavina

    drawing:
  • Adgur Dzidzaria
  • Akhra Adzhindzhal
  • Rustam Khamdamov
  • Varvara Bubnova

    painting:
  • Adgur Dzidzaria
  • Alexander Lozovoy
  • Alexey Shervashidze-Chachba
  • Constantine Inal-Ipa
  • Igor Tulpanov
  • Ivan Titov
  • Levars Butba
  • Milana Gvaramia
  • Nikolay Kabanov
  • Nino Kuprava
  • Pedro Clavijo-Parrado
  • Rustam Khamdamov
  • Shavkat Abdusalamov
  • Stas Chermensky
  • Victor Lysakov
  • Vladimir Andreenkov

    photo:
  • Ja’bagh Kaghado
  • Katya Shkolnik
  • Svetlana Petrukhova
  • Vladimir Clavijo-Telepnev

    production:
  • Production

    projects:
  • Alexander F. Sklyar
  • Art Monaco 2011
  • Birthday of Piero
  • Celebrating Holiday Eve
  • Fazil Iskander
  • Hibla Gerzmava
  • Parisian Salon d'Automne
  • Rhythm. Shape. Construction
  • Shazina Agrba
  • Ăŕëĺrĺ˙ Ńtóäč˙

    skulpture:
  • Ludmila Karaeva
  • Vladimir Andreenkov

  • 12.04.2006

    Before the white canvasWhat advantageth it me, if the dead rise not?
    1 Corinthians, 15, 32

    A painting which came to life in a rapt quietness of the heavenly light participates in the liturgy of the possessed ones with its all colours.

    Standing before the canvas, the artist can hear an echo of centuries passed: a superhuman power of Michelangelo, divine beauty of Boticelli, heavenly asceticism of Giotto, and even something like this: it was God who directed Leonardo's hand... The modern artist is dreaming of the same miracle he lacks, i.e. of a supernatural help in all his formal excesses, in trying to justify them and finding his own ethical principle that he would be able to follow. He is dreaming of such things, even being aware that in the "last times" the miracles and the highness of the spirit by no means will define the face of the world. In their place there will be an agressive intellect, technology and will to power. He knows that even a tower made of ivory won't help and that inspiration will produce phantoms, while the innermost will again be hiding in the catacombs. Then the artist will have to go down the staircase of the ascent, running up to the new heaven. It will take some time not to become an affected and wordless part of the culture of the new age, a decorator of its salons and parks, a vignette designer, a parrot of fashionable ideas or a hired clerk in art market...

    The artists, possessing a mystical gift, could transfer the particles of paradise to earth. They were neither artists nor painters in the strict sense of profession, but they created the basis of pictorial art during the times of the New Testament. And what we owe them are those sparkles of the Pre-eternal Light beaming through the smog of vices. Not every modern artist deserves his candle to be inflamed by them. They are the anonymous icon-painters of Byzantine and Ancient Russia. It was on the base of their testimony of God's presence that afterwards people began erecting the tower of Babel of the consumer civilization.

    Just like pure snow once covering our fields, the ideal of Holy Russia was melting and turning into small streams flowing away into valleys, trying to keep to monastic cells. Ploughed with the earth, cut with sleigh-tracks, trampled and filled with lumps of mud, shovelled in dumps; children used to make snow fortresses of it which would turn into floods, mingling with sewage. And sometimes it would gather somewhere in the wild places of taiga, having preserved its freshness by some miracle, to remain in legends, gradually taken for folklore tales. How much time will it take the modern commonplace consciousness to regain this ideal? Maybe it will need a helping hand toward the whole mystical experience of Russian quietism?

    The artist's choice between chaos and harmony is first of all Biblical, and only after that it is the choice of a painting's style and school that can bring the viewer to the state of supernatural existence. Colours and forms of an unearthly glory of the Creator are incomprehensible, but their reflections are gliding along the"staircase" towards the ascending one. Besides other reasons, a creative act gets its justification on the way to salvation, because the inner fire of the artist burns a great many passions. It redeems his own sins, eliminates and heals feebleness. And a guardian angel, thinking of the soul, will carefully collect before the Judge, at the right time, those ownerless canvases, which remained to give evidence of the life once being overabundant...

    The artist must be exhausted by the world of his own paintings, which, in their turn, create himself according to what he had endowed them with. That is why the artist paints his still-life, so that, according to the prophet, he can feel "a light air" in "dead nature", while the other one constructs his performance, to close his ring of Mobius in the point of the fierce fall of man into Hell, because his state of mind is affected by death. But wherever the artist's imagination would run, whatever fantastical forms his expression would acquire, it can be justified only until that bound where his creative work ends and his Gethsemane begins, when all his work has been put to the test of the accordance with the idea of him as a mortal man, longing for the immortal. All the moments stopped by the artist, burn like straw, with the exception of those ones connected with the will of Creator.

    While the roots of mundane consciousness go back to visible, sensual and material life, religious consciousness spreads beyond its borders, and it envelopes all the plenitude of the universe, including the most important thing, i.e the mystery of existence after death. For Christians, strictly speaking, it is "revealed" not only in the limits open to illumination, but it is accepted by them as the sphere of eternal life, for which earthly life is just a sort of preparation. It means to keep restlessly to one's faith every hour, through following the commandments.

      The Saviour came to this world to overcome death. And instead of a personal catastrophe, death became a TRANSFORMED STATE OF AN INVIOLABLE SOURCE of man, A CROWNING SACRAMENT, giving a new meaning to any creative undertaking, that is, as far as the destined strength allows, to be a participator of the mystery of salvation fulfilled, and also its preacher, no matter what you are: a carpenter, a gardener, or a musician.

    The anticipation of this great mystery has touched the most fertile layers of art and its highest masterpieces made of black earth and humus and of the love sprouting on them, which reveals itself in every line and accord. Those masterpieces came to existence thanks to the guiding images of the life structure renovated in Christ. We should remember that in all skills the basis of the courage of zealots' faith was not only their own experience, but it was, first of all, the experience that made its way through the comprehension of the Revelation.

    When the artist turns to the sacral, it gives him a miraculous freedom, just like the law of icon-painting concentrates strivings for consciously mystical contemplation; and this is not only a matter of what he believes in, he KNOWS the object of his faith, thus approaching the main goal of his work, which is to gain the grace that had touched him and whose images he just reproduces in colours. Even most dramatic compositions will remain but a low layer of the earthly world if behind them you don't feel a breathing of the otherworldly sorrow.

      A painting's charming force is in the velvety quietness of its voice; it is an extremely thin, almost transparent barrier between the visible and the hidden, it is the bridge and the crossroads between the equidistant banks, i.e. between the commonplace sensuality and otherworldly spaciousness of the impassive peace, between the lunar calender of mysteries and the joy of the renovated nature of the Easter. With all its masterpieces, valuable in all times and participating in spiritual development, painting testifies that there is no worthy creative act beyond the Truth.

    I wish I could say that the contemporary artist can also hear the music of the heavenly light, not only an underground rumble coming from the inferno, or a rustling of paper money; that he continues to create, overcoming the suffocation by deceit and the power of decay. Or maybe, seeing the gangs of criminals mocking the Motherland, he would sell his clothes and buy the sword the Saviour spoke of...

    Segui in tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti!

    The lonesome way of the artist is humble and naked in its defenselessness, his soul is just a candle in the teeth of the wind of the elements; however, this is the soul, and not the whole civilization, which has become closely linked with the life-giving source. This is the soul to be indictable when all machines will stop their work and the screens of all computers will fail; then, all virtual reality created by them will subside on to roadside burdocks, like a sham foam, and the heaven opened wide will reveal its last power over man. Realizing this, the artist will become an involuntary bearer of the eschatological state. Not a menacing memento mori, but a secret living in the unfolding scroll of the times, preparing him for the meeting with the last declared mystery, will become his universe and destiny. Moreover, it can become his debt, if to have in mind the parable of the talent. Hence painting has not withered away because of neon signs, like an oil-lamp. It either means that it was not invented by man just for some time, or that it was invented not by man, he only felt it and recognized it in himself as the imperative.

    The talent of the painter is neither his justification nor self-sufficiency, because his skill possesses all the means of taking a human being up to the world of spiritual substances and supernatural reality, out of which, most bright abilities melt in the residual light of the Pre-eternal, giving way to the passion of self-assertion, this insidious and attractive force which has been producing Cain's new offsprings for centuries, who, despite their relationship through God, are armed with the philosophy of egocentrism, beginning from Nietzsche's "God is dead" to the neo-hedonistic cult of the moral chaos. Sooner or later, a tepid artist will become a potential conductor of theomachy - "He that is not with me is against me", and when the artist avoids increasing the beauty of the Divine world, it is the beginning of "soft" apostasy fraught with "hard" betrayal of God, which is inevitably followed by his suicide as an artist, the way of Judas.

    Of course, the quiet voice of painting makes conditional its possibilities and its peripheral role at the sidewalk of the landing strip of the civilization. However, despite its keeping aside from concrete and steel, its ingenuous flowers are nearer to natural primordial life; and blessed is the artist working in such a way that his skill will never become the mirror of the "great whore"of the Apocalypse.

    When a human being gives up God, God gives him up as well, letting him degrade to the state of an animal and lets him come down to Hell not only as a punishment, but as a personal choice of man himself who ruins his soul of his own free will and approaches the boundary called "absolute time". Its signs, which were predicted two thousand years ago, can be easily read today on every pillar of the planetary Sodom, where the most incredible thing becomes possible, i.e. when just a single word contradictory to all forms of anti-life, a single spark can cause the chain reaction of the last Transfiguration.

    ... Standing before the white canvas, the artist is listening to the news announcer speaking that at last, by joint efforts of the scientists of several universities, the secret of the cell has been discovered. According to a brief commentary, this discovery means that from now on man will no longer be a mortal and final being, humiliatingly dependent on the laws of nature. It is also said that the victory over death via co-crucifixion with Christ has been replaced by a more "civilized" scientific method of receiving immortality WITHOUT SACRIFICE. A restorative renovation of the whole individuals' structure, which can come true only in death and via death, is no longer a necessary condition of eternal life, because henceforth man will remain in his body and in his apartment with his habits and his own people, forever. At last he will achieve the long-awaited goal of all civilizations, which is to establish his absolute right to a never-ending earthly enjoyment via gaining earthly immortality.



    news archive


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    Beauty Structures

  • 03.11.2014:
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  • 28.02.2014:
    Art project Ja'bagh Kaghado «Undamaged Blossom»

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