LOOK AT ME...

Oil Paintings by Igor Tcholaria

 

  From Tuesday 14 October 2003

Exhibitions continues for 4 weeks 

 

click here to see images

 

Born in 1959 in a small charming town on the Black Sea coast of Georgia, Igor Tcholaria has participated in about a hundred exhibitions at home and abroad. 

His superb technical mastery is undoubtedly attributable to his rigorous art training by his excellent teachers

at the Sukhumi Art School, Georgia, and further at the Academy of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg from which he graduated in 1985. It was there that he acquired his consummate skills in various classical and modern artistic techniques and came to develop a unique, recognizable style of his own. While occasionally drawing upon classical elements, he has nevertheless learned to organise the space of his canvasses with originality and aplomb. Hence the oscillating specks of colour reminiscent of Cézanne which punctuate the swathes of darkness tinged with gold by the passing of time and conjure Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro.

The bizarre, phantasmagoric elements of life in the Soviet era and profusion of colours reverberating in Caucasian nature virtually all the year round inevitably had a powerful impact on the artist’s imagination.

His absolutely unrestrained, audacious use of colour, joined with impressively well-defined composition, are recognised instantly, and intrigue and draw a remarkably diverse audience at every show. It seems his paintings bridge successfully the gap between traditional and modern taste.

The Colour is the main personage, force and constant component of his intricate compositions, where each painting is a fairy tale to tell and a romance to listen. Igor Tcholaria is “A Magician with Colour…”

(R. de Cnodder, AICA). His paintings are an explosion of joyful energy in luxurious colours, where everything moves and excites, and everything is Colour.

Tcholaria’s art essentially has no need of models. It seems to derive boundless inspiration from the world around and the vast experience of life, past and present.  This is why he enjoys portraying eternal carnival characters such as dancers, harlequins, and ballerinas. In that respect, the artist’s visually intriguing creations are reminiscent of A. Benois and Bakst, members of the World of Art group (Mir Iskusstva, 1890s), which included the world known impresario Dyagilev. At the same time, it seems that all those merry clowns and heart-broken harlequins or almost surrealistic figures at the background of some of his paintings serve exclusively the purpose of interpreting myriads functions of Colour.  As Shakespeare once said, “All the world’s a stage”, and Tcholaria’s exhibition is yet more proof of this.

 

Many of his works are in private collections in England, the US, Belgium, and South Africa.  They have been acquired by a diverse  range of people including the international ice hockey star Mogilny and the renowned designer John Galliano.  The whereabouts of three canvasses stolen from Roy Miles’s gallery in London are still unknown. 

Recently the artist received a commission to create two four-metre panels for the world’s largest ocean liner, the Queen Mary II, which is due to embark on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York early 2004.