A talented person is talented of many things. A painter, graphic artist, poet and scholar Zura Kalanda is one of those contemporary creative personalities, who have managed to fulfill themselves through several spheres of art. His gift is profoundly synthetic. It is like a fruit that has imbibed both the will to survive, which shows itself through its roots percolating into the soil and gaining a foothold there, and the will to grow from its striving upwards stem. Life juices, flowing through it, grant blossoming while the fruit terminates the cycle fraught with new generation.
The future artist was born and grew up in the heart of Georgia – its capital Tbilisi – under conditions both hothouse and rough. His parents did their best to put all their potential of the most educated people of the time into the molding of their son’s personality. He was extremely inspired by the creative oeuvre of his father and by the cultural atmosphere created by the artists, writers and composers, who frequented their house. The artist’s formation was also much influenced by his family roots planted deeply in Georgian soil, in Georgian folk culture. His grandfather was an admirer of choral singing. Those who have ever heard Georgian folk songs will always remember their tonal and sonic inimitableness, a peculiar spirit of ascetic joy.
His inner life was ineffaceably marked by the encounter with the “prose of life” connected with the dissident aspect of his father’s activities. A poet and theorist of literature Giorgi Kalandadze spent seven years of his life in labour camps for political prisoners. On the whole, not withstanding a “double life” that the family was forced to live, its spiritual environment based on a deep-laid continuity of traditions was a happy one. Discovering these traditions in Zura Kalanda’s seemingly absolutely European painterly and graphic works, you marvel at the power of blood since it is blood, that speaks through various international language forms engendered by the efforts of the 20th century avant-gardist art.
Creativity is always talking “through”, though. Since the classical avant-garde era all contemporary (actual) art has aspired to formula presentation growing through the artist’s flesh and blood. This interesting peculiarity of contemporary art reveals itself upon further acquaintance with Zura Kalanda’ s oeuvre. Take for example his painting “The Beginning”. The figures seem to emerge from the background – at any rate, they don’t detach themselves from it as if remaining its accessory. The artist enjoys applying the same method to decorative compositions, such as “Cats” and “Fishes”, in which the static figures – symbols of changeable and mobile space advance to the forefront from the color kaleidoscope as parts of it.
The subject is set against the background flowing into it and coming back again, and demonstrating – by this pictorial device – the total conception of Nature: every beginning has its hidden end.This is an entire philosophic doctrine. In the oeuvre of Zura Kalanda it reveals itself both in the context of his art as related to contemporaneity, to modern avant-garde art in particular, and from the point of view of its national character. It is symbolism or, in other words, formularity that incredibly enough relates his art to the classical avant-garde, but Zura Kalanda has his own, exclusively original accent : his own character, his own manner of speech – unhurried, poetically tinted and definitely national. His graphics very often represent some kind of the author’s hieroglyphs: practically one line drawing. It can be a simple, well-marked, geometricized line, stiff and pliant like wire, or vice versa, incredibly expressive. In any case, the author strives towards a formula, symbol or a letter as an exponent of his concept. His “hieroglyph” has always been thoroughly thought through even if it represents some intricate “Asiatic Motifs” with a bejeweled scattering of graphic scrolls and minor details. The similar illusion of “simultaneity” of drawing, in which the beginning and the end are closely welded, and the end seems to grow from the beginning can be found in artworks of Pablo Picasso – as a manifestation of exactly the author’s hieroglyphics, his personal discourse with this century.
The stylistics of Zura Kalanda’s works can be likened to visual expressiveness of Georgian script with its specific restraint of rounded lines intertwining into continuous alphabetic lace. In this regard the artist’s childhood reminiscences are amazing. He became familiarized with the art-making process early in life.Zura Kalanda started drawing at the age of seven, and the artist asserts, that his style has not changed since then. Before that he had faced certain problems with calligraphy. Bluntly speaking, the child’s handwriting was bad, and he was given a task to improve it. During classes he automatically drew letters, and suddenly they started turning into images. This way a national symbol sank into his consciousness, imprinted on his mind on some automatic, mechanical level. A human being, as you know, is a surprisingly well-organized organism all parts of which are supposed to inter-coordinate to fulfill one mutual project.
Speaking about lessons in calligraphy we encounter an amazing phenomenon. At large, fine art as such is nothing but script. A letter – as the beginning of fixing of any language in its written form; creation of the alphabet – as putting a system of various symbols in order; formation of this very system – as carving from a formerly shapeless boulder of a certain fine sculptured figure, some logical form inscribed in the Divine Providence. People living on Earth speak a multitude of languages. Nevertheless, there are far less alphabets created by mankind throughout its entire history. Among them is one of the world’s cultural gems – the Georgian alphabet based on strict phonological principle: one and only one strictly defined grapheme corresponds to each phoneme. Some of the ancient Georgian monuments represent nothing, but surfaces covered all over with letters rarely alternated with ornamental or some other graphic motifs. Georgian art has always been noted for the accuracy and refinement of figurative language whether they are miniatures, woodcarvings, embossing, frescoes or mosaics. One of the most peculiar features of Georgian art is planar treatment of form, development of the composition on the surface.We find all this in the stylistic tendency of Zura Kalanda’s oeuvre.
Discovering direct correlation of the representational system of his paintings and graphic works with the stylistic peculiarity of the Georgian script you arrive at the idea of super-positive nationalism that is surely present, not always apparently though, in the oeuvre of the artist as something fundamental, formative, as a quintessence, ferment, catalyst. In the foreword to his “In Front of the Mirror” poetic miscellany, illustrated with formula precise, laconically symbolic graphic images, its translator Irene Sergeeva writes: “What is the name of the author’s Muse? Sakartvelo, Iveria, Georgia, Motherland which has never abandoned his heart…” As you get to know the geographical splendour of this blessed country, the profundity and inexhaustive potential of its ancient, deeply Christianized and at the same time exceptionally original culture, you get to know the artist’s unique universe: the mythopoetic reality of which is mysterious and inimitable, just as befits the universe.
One can speak volumes about each painting by Zura Kalanda, studying and examining it, getting into contact with the creative ego of the artist and empathizing with his perfect incarnation of vision. The title of his recent book of poems is “In front of the Mirror”. Nevertheless, the artist is not examining his own features in the mirror, it is most likely that this mirror is the only thing surrounding him. Reflecting in such a mirror, the artist (or his artistic soul) seems to leaf through, to page the world’s pictures, absorbing them and then filtering onto a canvas or a sheet of paper by way of reflected images. With an artist having a different mentality these could be realistic landscapes, for example. With Zura Kalanda these are mythopoetic images. Transformation takes place exactly on the level of reflection.
Here is one of the canvases under the title “Identity” (“The Artist’s World “). Within the space of a single canvas the author repeatedly returns to the motif of a palette, that becomes a figurative motif of the work and its colour-structural refrain, a dominating note in the development of narration – creation and, finally, that of an integral formula contained in the title. Here palette is both the artist’s tool and the painting itself. Palette is the entire world including its foundation, a basement from which, as a possibility of sacrificial justification, emerges a vertical. Thus, within the space of a single canvas the artist has managed to record and set forth a whole world view. The sense contained in the title is a priori polysemantic and so needs some symbolic incarnation. It is likened to a semantic mould or, let us say, an extremely condensed summary of eternal, imperishable themes of art.
One of such imperishable, eternal themes of world art is man and woman. This theme occupies a special, significant place in the oeuvre of Zura Kalanda. He considers it both within the Biblical and common everyday contexts from the point of view of a philosopher, a psychologist and simply a man of honor. Such canvases as “Family Warmth” are a whole cosmography: a description of the World, a description of the Universe. In the multi-figured, decoratively structured composition, resembling a panel or a fresco, the artist brings in the whole world indeed – from Adam’s apple to salutary grapes. In the “Man and Woman” diptych each character is lonesome and confronts its own uncertainty in the magic pose of a person doomed to develop its territory. Each one of them has left behind his back his own “tree of knowledge of good and evil”, they all lack unity.
The artist is strict and exacting in treatment of the theme that could be identically conveyed only by means of some other language of art – poetry or music – and accordingly structures the graphic space, of which each fragment is well thought-out and weighed on the scales of artistic intuition and mastery. The eternal themes of male and female, love, human relationships, family and solitude find original interpretation in the multi-figured graphic compositions confined within the shape of a drop – these are among the most intriguing and fanciful works by Zura Kalanda. Ascending, like in painting, to the “alphabetic” form, the aesthetics of graphic form in Zura Kalanda’s oeuvre presents it even more vividly and distinctly.
The symbolic language of Zura Kalanda’s art is poetic and musical. Here is the painterly nocturne “Night” suggestively saturated with dark blue shades of colour. The history of painting keeps various examples of interaction between fine art and music, nevertheless, only single instances achieve such harmony, when painting seems to turn into music. Zura Kalanda does not set himself no such a task as, for example, Serge Charchoune did – to depict music itself. Nevertheless, music resounds in his works – both indirectly and directly. In his childhood the future artist got a music education, he plays the guitar. The musical themes in Kalanda’s oeuvre should be singled out to form a separate topic which, due to its specific character, only a musician would be able to cope with. In the works by Zura Kalanda one can intuitively catch, his ability in composing songs. The rounded, fluent graphic forms of his canvases are musically grouped into various harmonious chords consisting, in their turn, of singing lines, sonorous colour-rhythms.
The painting “Power” sounds like a suite on a given topic built on indicative repetitions of human feebleness in the face of the golden calf. In the “Nostalgic Landscape” a man in the embryonic pose strains his ears to hear and simultaneously absorbs his own thoughts like music waves. A similar character is near a shoot growing from the womb of the Earth in the painting “Waiting”, and so is the “Muse” waiting for the call of her creator to impart her energy and encourage the rise of his talent. Both of them could have existed, for example, within the space of ambient style “cosmic” music. In the kaleidoscopically shimmering colors of “The Road of Life”, aspiring to the status of a big modern fresco rather than that of a painting, like in any other painting of Zura Kalanda music is sure to sound like an inner impetus for deeds accomplished throughout a lifetime by a human-the most sophisticated tool of the universe.