Watch and see!

The organizers dedicated the exhibition to modern Donetsk, while the paintings shown might be seen as facets of a free person’s soul. They found just such a person in Avtandil Gurgenidze, a unique Georgian artist. Looking at his paintings, one experiences feelings associated with the otherworld, the spirit which flies wherever it wishes, and with the fairytale. Rather than depict matter as crude and obtrusive, his works show it to be a living and breathing substance that therefore lacks specific contours or straight lines. In my home town as painted by the artist, streetlights are talking to trees and looking sadly for each other, and even streams of smoke (remember, it is Donetsk the industrial powerhouse) are invitingly sensual.

Colors blend easily with each other in an intense, but still subtle radiance. Gurgenidze chose orange and pink palette for his cycle “City D,” the choice being particularly meaningful in Donetsk context, as orange is a color of the city’s prime soccer team’s uniform...

The combination of the features coming both from our world and the parallel one reveals the secret that only the artist himself had known. Depending on the quantity and quality of the elements that are synthesized on the canvas, one sees images of varying degrees of complexity and novelty shaped. The painter’s works can be examined for a long time, because in them, every dot, every curvy silhouette or color transition makes sense and serves as the beginning of a new image!

The artist addresses us in the language of the heart, that is, the language of children’s drawings and decorative painting. We see how images can care about each other, and how, in spite of the superficial Caucasian passionate eccentricity which is generating ornate schemes, love conquers everything! The paintings emanate joy, sincerity, and integrity. The artist deliberately leaves his works nameless, allowing the viewer to have fun naming them.

Gurgenidze is a young Georgian muralist, photographer and tourist guide. He graduated from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts and participated in over 50 exhibitions in Georgia and Europe, winning numerous art and photo contests and receiving many grants. Besides canvas painting, the artist has been active in monumental painting, or mural art, projects. His designs decorate the Nadzaladevi subway station in Tbilisi, defunct weather station Mtis Qokhi Betlemi in the Kazbek Mountains at an altitude of 3,750 m, ski stations at the resort of Gudauri, and many streets, squares and street objects in Georgia and Europe.

By the way, both mural art and street art, which uses the whole world as one big canvas, are now the fastest developing art forms. I think that our city would only benefit from having a few such objects created there, as Tbilisi, where Gurgenidze works and lives, already has! He held successful exhibitions in Warsaw, Frankfurt, Berlin, Kyiv, and Riga!

Further to it, the artist visited the municipal art gallery Art-Donbas recently, too, and held two workshops entitled “Drawing Tbilisi Old Town” there. The Georgian maestro was so popular that the gallery’s conference hall got short of places.

Contemporary art is appealing to some not-involved-yet segments of the human psyche. It renovates, supplements, and creates a new psychology of perception and feeling. Be open to it, and you will learn to see, not just watch!