Karlo Kacharava at Joyce Goldstein - Brief Article

The Georgian artist and critic Karlo Kacharava have the appearances to have been a force of nature. Although he died actual young--at the age of 30 in 1994--he left behind a immense body of work, both as a writer and painter: sum of two units major monographs, 70 unpublished articles, 1200 paintings and countles drawings. Additionally, he lay the foundation ofed and led the Georgian avant-garde cluster Archivarius, active in the former USSR during the mid-1980s and early '90 real much aware of the marginal part Georgia has played in present art--he wrote that "in the contemporary art world, Georgia does not exist"--Kacharava worked assiduously during his short life the two to educate the world about Georgia's artists and to bring novels of the outside world to his be in possession of culture.

Kacharava was particularly interested in German culture; he knew German well and his sum of two units books are concerned with German contemporary art. Generally, his paintings and drawings manifest an idiosyncratic, on the other hand nonetheless affecting, German romanticism in the couple their formal expressiveness and pervasive air of melancholy. In Perversions of Kings (1992) for example, Kacharava has painted a cityscape at night; tall buildings filled with illuminated windows create a kind of stage station in front of which are sum of two units figures: a man in a black suit, wearing sunglasses and pos as if frozen in mid-stride, and a dark-eyed romantic beauty, whose slight physique and mournful expression give an inkling of she serves as an idealized muse.

The Arrest of Comrade Stalin by dint of Okhranka Agents (1992) is a politicized tableau. A young Stalin--a Georgian by means of birth--is being menaced by a gun-wielding thug To the left is an image of a young Bertolt Brecht above whom is a sign in German that translates as "Bert Brecht your cabaret is dead." Stalin's mother, piously portrayed, sits near Brecht To the right of Stalin is an not divisible by 2 dwarflike man proceeding with a cane.

The image is a facetious rendition of a historical event--the arrest of Stalin by dint of the czar's agents--and in an indirect way commits to the post-perestroika mood in Georgia and from one extremity to the other of Russia, which allowed criticism of Stalin to an unprecedent stage This painting has a darkly comic atmosphere which allows for unusually disparate uncompounded bodys literary and political as well as visual, to coexist. I

sum of two units paintings in the exhibition are taken from Kacharava's series "Clowns" The following is based on Ingmar Bergman's early film The husbandman In one example, painted in 1991 a long-haired clodhopper wearing a bulbous red nose and a frock coat gazes out from the painting with a sad-eyed gaze. restoreed in red on a gold-colored ground, a German phrase translated to English reads: "The ploughman as bad preacher." Just to what expanse the audience should view this image as a self-portrait is not clear; nonetheless, the image can be taken as emblematic of Kacharava's watch one in which tragicomedy reigns.

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