Vakho Bugadze
“Caucasian Orangery”
September – November, 2022
68 Razmadze Street
Flowers first came into Vakho Bugadze’s focus a few years ago when he “discovered” them, became excited at this first encounter, and began to express his feelings towards them by producing multiple images. Flowers had never been a subject of any of his works before, nor had his landscapes featured any kind of vegetation. His artistic world, bounded by conventional or architectural backgrounds, completely lacked this component. Suddenly, however, from 2021, images of flowers made using oil paints or watercolors started to emerge as saturated artistic spots on Bugadze’s large-scale canvases and fabrics of various textures. The transition to plant paintings marked a new phase, following on from his abstract images that had been produced using the same technique. The artist transferred his own creativity from urban settings into airy spaces, where he created a model of the ideal world and applied a plant narrative to demonstrate its superiority.
The artist produces the image of a plant as an unidentified species, in such a way that he often does not even define the upper and lower parts of the picture. The painting may also be perceived as being “upside down” mode, which is caused by the object’s separation from real space and its characteristic logical dimensions. It literally means being uprooted; in a state of a free fall and aimless flight. It resembles a situation where something is washed away by water or dispersed by the wind. The whole is filled with the tension of disappearance. Free backgrounds that are spread over large vertical canvases draw associations with the concept of emptiness from Japanese paintings, and represent “waterfalls” of cascading flowers created by the spontaneous flowing arrangement of colored spots. Torrents of flowers or a single flower petal float or fly on the surface of the work to create the effect of a reflected image. The texture of the paint creates murky circular ripples that radiate as if from a pebble dropped into the water. Sometimes the images resemble trembling flowers or leaves that are scattered in the air. These spots are colored “signals” that simultaneously focus on two phases of the plant’s state – that of blooming and of losing petals. In this way the artist shares with us the strange, magical, and beautiful effect of the flower’s short-lived existence. He paints the plant at the point of culmination – emanating beauty and blossoming, deepening the pain of disappearing beauty and reminding us of his work’s main theme: an empathetic position towards bodily metamorphoses, embracing both strong feelings and the inevitability of the end of physical existence. And, if earlier Bugadze showed this position through dramatic emotions (Pieta) and by demonstrating the “adventures” of the body and its expressive textures (Hippodrome, Centaur’s Love), now, through this series of flowers, he moves this feeling from the register of weightiness to a state of gentle excitement. The works create an impression that the author has come to terms with the rational inevitability of bodily death, and awarded it a festive brilliance. The vegetation that is created by the deformed outlines of transparent spots is loaded with bright shimmering flowers or filled with soft colors. Through a combination of the rhythm of stems and leaves inserted into the vertical schemes of the paintings, the empty backgrounds, and dynamic images, the artist creates a formula that helps the bodies of objects to reach the limit of another essence: they lose their “matter” corporeity and thus the pain of the ephemeral condition of existence also vanishes.
The series consists of twelve works which were developed by Bugadze between 2021 and 2022.
“The Caucasian Orangery” is a conditional title; a curatorial position regarding the name of the exhibition, which the artist also agreed with. The gallery’s “garden model” project and a new phase of the artist’s work come together in a brand new exhibition space that opens its doors with this solo show by Vakho Bugadze. The geographical localization in the title offers an allusion to the place of Georgians’ physical existence: the theme of our roots and our uprooting from them. These elements become particularly relevant under conditions of globalization, war, and constant displacement – the inherent problems of the Caucasus, a territory which is constantly subject to the pressure of geopolitical threats.