Art should be necessary and free, but it
should never be a slave to nature
gnacio Zuloaga
In the twentieth century and, particularly, in the new millennium, artistic universalism has become an extremely rare phenomenon. In an age of narrow professionalism, a master is generally completely absorbed in his or her speciality. The “Ingres violin” – the classical metaphor for an artist’s “other passion” – seems to have been forgotten forever.
Zura Kalanda – an artist, poet, art theorist and philologist – is a happy exception. In his childhood he also studied music. The world of art is open to him in a multitude of aspects. This possibly explains why his pictures evoke so many associations. They seem to contain a sound, special rhythms, entire parades of literary reminiscences.
Universal talent is an unusually broad world and aspires to create its own artistic universe. History knows many examples. Sergei Eisenstein was a brilliant draughtsman. Nikolai Akimov the artist was a worthy competitor (and confederate) of Akimov the producer. Gordon Craig was the director and scenic designer of his own productions. Alexander Scriabin dreamt of color music. William Blake painted pictures and wrote poems. Before realizing his most important and final calling, the great Arnold Schönberg passed the test of painting, working alongside Wassily Kandinsky.
Finding one’s style, without having a command of the craft, is a pointless undertaking. As Chinese painter Shi Tao said: “Learn the rules and you will succeed in the changes”. Taking up painting independently, Kalanda did not wish to remain a dilettante, so he began to study seriously. Ever since the late 1970’s, the artist’s plastic experiments have been based on the professionalism without which freedom of quests cannot exist. Painting created as part of a universal action, pictures resounding to poetic works, verses carrying an echo of plastic harmonies – all these are the undoubted merits of the creative universalism of Zura Kalanda.
Spanish philosopher Ravira was profoundly correct when he suggested, that “everything that does not have a tradition becomes plagiarism”. There is an inherent need for a dialogue with the past and the present. Art and the iconosphere are now no less realistic, than nature itself – and the same source of motifs for the artist as the material world. André Malraux wrote about this back in 1947 in Le Musée Imaginaire (Museum without Walls), confirming the necessity and usefulness of already existing art entering art that was being created.
Now, much depends on the artist’s force of spirit and individual talent. Whether to become a passive participant of these cunning games or to place them imperiously, at the service of one’s own talent. Zura Kalanda chose the latter. He engages in a dialogue with time on an equal footing. Although he has a fluent command of modern art, he prefers his own language, intensifying it and resounding to modern plastic codes. He fully retains his own sharp and subtle individuality.
Kalanda possesses a quality not often encountered in our days – temperament. His chromatic energy is enchained in a regulated linear system – one much calmer, than the colouring of his works. They are like clots of “artistic substance”, compressed to the point of explosive power. They contain a gripping danger, saturated with flares of pure, putrefying or burning colours. The artist loves an open, sometimes local colour, often welding it into the lace of black contours or surrounding bright, multi-coloured planes with a black background, conjuring up associations with medieval stained-glass windows or the paintings of Georges Rouault.
In his dialogue with the “grandees” of the twentieth century Kalanda retains not only his personal stylistics, but also his clear roots in the national tradition. This does not imply the use of standard ethnographic ornamentation, but secret rhythms and plastic archetypes of Georgian iconography immersed in the deep layers of the image.
Kalanda’ s pictures address eternal, parabolist motifs – love, hope, harmony, calm and overcoming fear. The artist seeks the fundamental principles of existence, a myth, addressing both what is commonly called the “collective unconscious” and a memory lingering on in culture and faith.
Reality, dream, fairytale, myth, memories – all this is naturally and organically synthesised in Kalanda’s art. At times, the internal becomes external, extending beyond the bounds of consciousness into the real world, while the external dissolves in the “artistic substance”. Then, the master comes very close to non-figurative painting, entrusting his thoughts and intuition to pure form and a plastic hint, finding enough expressiveness in the sensitive element of colours and lines to realise any major concept. Just as reality mixes with imaginary, magical images in dreams or reverie, faces and phantoms of faces, flowers, objects, birds and animals occasionally arise in the impetuous flashes of painterly substance.
What is particularly important here is, that Zura Kalanda always retains the exultant decorativism, guarding the flatness of the picture surface and “rhyming” the lines and patches of colour with an inimitable feeling of plastic harmony. Even when he creates graphic, black-and-white works, they still retain – and intensify – this phantasmagoria of the internal and external, again entwined in rhythmic liner laces.
The kaleidoscope of impetuous modern transnational life finds a peaceful synthesis in the artist’s pictures. Slowly and irreversibly, it enchants the viewer, touching the depths of his soul, liberating it and uncovering the secret aesthetics of concealed emotions and notions.
At his happy age – the master is slightly over fifty – Zura Kalanda could well apply the words of Dante to himself: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita” (“Having journeyed half of life’s way”). Kalanda is at a stage, where he can both sum up the past and reflect on the future. A fortunate time for a major talent.