Presence in Absence
Levan Lagidze, City in the Mountains, 2023, oil on canvas, 130 x 105cm, on exhibit “Levan Lagidze: Macondo”, Katrine Levin Galleries, London, through 18 November, 2023
Side view
Part of the magic of Lagidze’s masterpieces is their ability to reflect back to us the best parts of ourselves.
The rhythm, textures, and colours of his works awaken memories and feelings - long cherished or long forgotten, well-understood or as yet undefined, major or minor - that are an integral aspect of the tapestry we call “self”. All of us have our strengths and weaknesses, things we like and things we’d like to change. Yet Lagidze’s paintings evoke recollections of wonder and happiness in line with his philosophy that “in today’s world, art carries a mission for harmonious existence and happiness.” His works unite and, I think, in this unity we can transcend all differences without sacrificing our diversity.
“Levan Lagidze: Bach Exercises”, Katrine Levin Galleries, New York, NY, 2019
Levan Lagidze, Village in the Mountains, 2019, oil on canvas, 130 x 105cm, private collection, Italy
Detail from Village in the Mountains (see above)
Here is an excerpt from a 2020 Zoom interview with Lagidze, in answer to my question of “how much of you is in your art?”
“It’s always me and at the same time there is nothing of me … I am always present and absent at the same time. The mental principle is the same as when an artist physically steps back from the canvas to gain perspective - distance. Simultaneously the artist is both the viewer and the creator. Jorge Luis Borges once wrote - and I like it very much - ‘how incredible it would be to imagine space without yourself in it’. It’s very difficult, almost impossible to imagine this.”
Levan Lagidze, Composition 6, 2023, oil on canvas, 35 x 32cm, on exhibit (sold) “Levan Lagidze: Macondo”, Katrine Levin Galleries, London, through 18 November, 2023
And yet conversely, in this self-less space without the confines of pre-conceptions, we can rediscover ourselves. As Lagidze explains it, it is as
“when we read a novel it may trigger a memory of something within ourselves that we lived through but could not previously define and the novel brings back the memories and you discover that yes, that’s exactly what it was, that was what I felt.”
That is the power of a Lagidze painting - to remind us of our own inner light.
On exhibit, “Levan Lagidze: Macondo”, Katrine Levin Galleries, London, through 18 November, 2023
Side view of “The Blue”, Levan Lagidze, 2023, oil on canvas, 105 x 130cm, on exhibit, Katrine Levin Galleries, London, through 18 November 2023