By Marta Kis
During his one-month stay in Croatia Irakli Bugianishvili has made a whole series of paintings of solitary areas with a single motif of forsaken houses in stark landscapes. The accentuated solitude radiating from these paintings is brimming with emotion and should by no means be mistaken for coldness. Vertical lines of liquid colour are an additional painting element which – as the author claims – separates the observer from the painting. In his earlier paintings he achieved similar distance by using reflecting glass which hid his portrayed heroes. But where is the painter in this relationship? Distant to us, these eerie deserted houses are a part of painter's inner artistic exploration. They may have been abandoned by everyone but he does not let them disintegrate nor fall into oblivion. By painting them in dark shades he does not allow them to scream, he rather speaks out himself, slowly from inside the painting, from the other side of the lines, pointing out problems of the alienated contemporary person. By living inside his paintings the painter breaks down the barriers he himself has raised earlier and draws the observer inside to join him in the picture after an intense visual consideration.
The Abandoned cycle precedes the recent bad news from Georgia, Bugianishvili home country. It is, thus, inevitably felt as a premonition, an artistic deliberation, an emotional connection. But these paintings do not speak of a single, concrete space. They symbolically represent the current state of many individuals, perhaps even species. Still, to become aware of a problem is the first step towards its solution and this is precisely the direction in which Irakli Bugianishvili is taking us.
Zagreb, 2008
