Tutu Kiladze
“Cryptogram”
November – December, 2022
19a Ingorokva Street
Naïve modernist paradigm of a play, the primitivist scheme of the Avant-garde, reflection of a toy horse of Dada and freedom of children’s drawings shape positional and emotional baselines of Tutu Kiladze’s work which is managed by the purest individual signature of the author. Freedom that is characteristic of childhood, the feeling of safety, security, and grandeur of the world and at the same time a tender connection between the humans and the things, ability to turn the objects into the toys, the pleasure of playing create the structure of artist’s works. Kiladze legitimizes safe territories for her characters turning these terrains that do not possess geographical dimension and rather imply a temporal category into the models of world perception which are related to the childhood phase and naive images. The author chooses long perspectives for depiction of the landscapes and scenes. She always presents the streets, fields, forests, squares, or conditional, colored planes from a distance to produce large spatial shots or small scenes full of figures scattered like the beads from a broken necklace. This way Kiladze creates a general flow of dynamic, and what is most astonishing, manages to replicate the movements and facial expressions of the miniature creatures with amazing virtuosity – an almost impossible thing to do due to the distant location of the images. The artist draws specific gestures or features of conditional schematic outlines using this manipulation for sending out the emotional signals that resonantly transfer the audience into the childhood, fill it with a feeling of happiness and achieve the main mission of art to conduct mental and emotional transmission, to reveal a secret of transition and transformation.
The artist’s works combine the effect of Alice in Wonderland, a magical ritual, and the power of play. The figures and their parodies of the bodies, facial expressions, and gestures along with the landscapes and primitivist deformed objects remind us of children’s drawings. They present colorful fairy tales with blue waves, bobbing pools, snowflakes, and flashes of sunlight; toy horses, goldfishes, nude bathers, funny animals, colorful meadows, fountains and water splashes.
The magic of Tutu Kiladze’s works strangely transforms into the paper abstractions and cryptograms from the series The Letters where the artist applies a combination of interwoven lines, letters and drawings to create large-scale images of Lettrist stylization. The large formats represent the linear labyrinths of neurons, expressive formulas of automatic writing, networks of repetitive actions and the webs woven with the “complex metastructure of the soul” which the artist tries to escape with the help of bright childhood images.