Surprised and slightly perplexed by the diversity of her work, I ask Keti Kapanadze whether there is a leitmotif running through her entire oeuvre. “In a manner of speaking, there is,” she replies “I am looking for an answer to the question of why we are born.” Not exactly a modest ambition for an artist whose career started in Tiflis, the capital of Georgia, a country that first gained its independence after decades of dependence on the Soviet Union. Cut off from the international art scene and for decades focused solely on Moscow, as the epicenter of the Soviet empire of which Georgia formed a part, the official policy was to adhere to the ideal of Socialist Realism, a type of art that idealized the future and one in which the individual played no part. Moreover, only painting and sculpture were considered art. Although people were aware that there also at some point in the past the photography of an Alexander Rodchenko had existed, that past was a long time gone.

So what should a young artist be doing in this kind of situation? How could she break away from her narrow confines? She started thinking about herself, asking herself: Who am I and who are the others? She took her passport photos and reworked them, portraying herself first as the lyric poet Sappho, then as a Native American chief, then as a Muslim man, a mustachioed businessman in a hat and then, by contrast, as a pharaoh’s daughter. Next, she turned her attention to her immediate surroundings, photographing the simplest of items – a cup cracked down the middle, a bed, the light on a parquet floor. And after that, she became interested in the people around her. She painted an open window with a view of a town’s cupolas and towers – onto the forehead of a cousin, and photographed the result. Then she painted the Grim Reaper onto the selfsame forehead and took yet another photo. Now all this happened back at the beginning of the 1990s.

Moreover, she traveled to Kazan, an old university city. There, she trained her camera on a man whom we never, however, see in his entirety. All that is to be seen in the photos are his hands with a cup of coffee, his back and his shoulders. And Kapanadze accompanied him through the wintry city. Loneliness, desolation and a loss of words are what is conveyed by these black-and-white photos dating from 1992-3. However, she then attempted to break out from this wordlessness. She penned sentences such as “Can you touch /Can you see/what can you see/ what can you touch”, “political decisions made for political reasons”, and “main part of the truth is when we lie”, on strips of paper. She held these in her hands and took more photos. And she cut sentences out of paper. In 1993, a squiggly “What is Love?” is suspended from the ceiling, illuminated by a simple lamp. The writing casts a giant shadow on the wall. However, is love really only a shadow?

And, generally speaking, is what we see indeed no more than what we see? Or is it merely an illusion, a mirage? Onto a sign which she had a young man hold up in front of her camera she wrote: “What I don’t see is not existing”. And in 1999, even before leaving Georgia, she produced a series of photos entitled “Fata Morgana”. In one of the pictures she can be seen, suited and hatted, poised on the roof complex of her 16-story residential block. An unreal city stretches out beneath her. But is it really her, or is it just an illusion – a mirage?

Parallel to this, from 1983 onwards she has produced a wealth of drawings. On a sheet of paper with black priming she uses white paint to display a camera standing on a tripod; its depth of focus intimated by a spiral. On another sheet a hammer is to be seen, the levered action carefully drawn. These drawings have the look of technical drawings. They are precise, as if attempting to prove the existence of these objects using technical formulas since what we can see is just not enough.

In the year 2000 Kapanadze left Georgia. She moved to Germany and then on to Switzerland. She spent months in Paris. And once again the question of “who am I” took on a new immediacy for her. This time, in 2002-3, she took photos of adverts, painted over them with red paint, projected her own portrait or one of somebody close to her on them, and took a second photo. “Displacement” is the name given to the photos portraying the artist herself and “Stigmata” to those showing other people. What the viewer sees are hermaphrodite beings; sometimes the artist is displayed as a man, at other times, as a glamorous star, sometimes the other people are shown as victims of acts of violence – something fueled by the red lines, which suggest blood. Violence, threats, even death is sometimes present in her earlier work. These things occur abruptly, like the Grim Reaper on her cousin’s forehead or the danger of falling in the photo “Fata Morgana”. This lends her oeuvre a melancholy quality, one that is sometimes transformed into something sarcastic.

The series of photos “Territorial Disorder”, which Kapanadze took in 2007 in an empty department store, is reminiscent of a ballad about falling. Dressed only in underwear she dances or, to be more accurate, she flees from her own nightmares, nightmares that pursue her in the form of giant figures. These are enlarged figures from inside children’s chocolate eggs: Kitschy figures from a phenomenon of mass culture which encourages even the youngest amongst us to become consumers. Kapanadze appears to capitulate in the face of the supremacy of the consumer industry, expressed principally in the illusory world of advertising photography, for years earlier, in 2001-2, she had produced a series of photographs in which she contrasted perfectly styled models with their even more perfect bodies and perfect smiles with Barbie dolls or cuddly toys. Artificiality breeds artificiality! In this way she distances herself from the illusory world of glossy magazines.

Instead she immerses herself in another illusory world, that of monuments and sculptures. In “Melancholie”, a series of painted pictures dating from 2008 with a slightly otherworldly feel to them she contrasts man with sculpture. As in the 2008 picture “Lost Soldiers”, for example, which shows four small human figures standing between four giant, towering statues of Roman sovereigns, man appears to be a shadow of these very statues – in other words, the shadow of his own history.

Why are we born? A big question that, despite her interest in art, theoretical physics and Indian mythology, even Kapanadze is not in a position to answer. But her art does demonstrate one thing – the chasm between her pictures and what it is that the latter refer to. Her last series of pictures, drawn, as of 2010, on a dark, shiny background, feature symbols drawn from mythical worlds and ornaments. As if these pictures were trying to tell us that there are no pictures apart from symbols and ornaments grounded in mythology. This series of pictures goes by the name of “Akasha chronicle”. The word refers to India’s predilection for the mythological approach to thinking and means something like the “sacred abyss from which everything springs and into which everything returns”. With Kapanadze, thisabyss is to be found within the realms of her own experience and her pictures do not always have to exist within the real world – but then again this is her strength.

Sometime, I'd like to write a book,
A book all about time,
About how it doesn't exist,
How the past and future
Are one continuous present.
I think that all people - those living, those who have lived
And those who are still to live - are alive now.
I should like to take that subject to pieces,
Like a soldier dismantling his rifle.
...
If eternity had a lost property office,
You might find there Savanorola's galosh,
Shakespeare's foot binding, Homer's pince-nez.
- Yevgeny Vinokurov

1. Drawing

A drawing can be complete in itself, the result of eye, brain and hand working together, with no aim except to capture reality or the contents of the imagination—or to make a drawing. Or it can be a plan, a preparation for a bigger, imagined thing. Drawing is like speech, in some respects. Keti Kapanadze's Ideal Death and Akasha paintings are conscious of these two modes and this clarity about drawing's nature gives the paintings a conceptual aspect. The paintings rely on Kapanadze's sketchbook drawings, and are drawings themselves, made with a brush. The way the drawings go off the edges, in particular the left and right hand sides, adds to the effect of an unfinished, or ongoing idea. The paintings might be sections of a frieze. Like maps they have no borders: one can imagine them wrapped round a globe. In this way they evoke time. For the most part they also have no horizon, and no ground, no floor. Figures float or fly.

'I draw like the Surrealists, without too much conscious thought, automatically. It is what is in my head.' In my conversations with Kapanadze she has stuck resolutely to this idea—with that pointed plainness artists often use when speaking of the making of their art. But she is not a Surrealist. Nevertheless she wants not to concentrate on what the drawing is going to look like, but on the action of making it. She fills sketchbooks, and uses the results, combining drawings onto one large canvas to make a composition. 'Putting drawings together made sense.' In the translation of the drawing on paper to drawings on canvas, the speed of the original drawing is indicated. We do not know what the comparative speeds of execution are—but the new version on canvas does not let us forget the original. 'Drawings are one per page, but in your mind the images are together—so together on the canvas they acquire a centrifugal, an expansive force.'

2. Akasha, time and death

19th century Baptists used 'akasha' to render 'heaven' in translations of Genesis. J.R. Ballentine, 'the sponsor and organiser of the study of Indian philosophy' criticised this as inaccurate. It was an idea Hegel, Schelling and Schopenhauer were interested in. 'The holy abyss from which everything proceeds and into which everything returns,' Schelling called Akasha. A concept of unity then.

Artist Vaishali Prazmari: 'Hinduism is about different manifestations of the same thing. Any emotion, or art, can be one of these aspects. But there is only one supreme being, one grand divine design.'

'The ultimate energy is called the akasa [sic],' writes Surendranath Dasgupta. 'Akasa is bliss (ananda).' It is consciousness, and 'the creation of the universe; life force and pleasures are based on Cicchakti or Akasa.' Cicchakti is defined in the Sanskrit dictionary I looked at as 'thinking power'. Akasha is also space, and pervades all things: it is immanent, then.

'Akasha...is associated with the quality of sound,' says Dasgupta—and therefore with hearing and speech. 'Sabda is regarded as the specific quality of akasa.' Sabda is 'the recognition that "sound" has levels of meaning'. It has 'illuminating power,' can be 'perceptible only to a poet'; can be thought itself. I am put in mind of MP Shiel's Gothic story Vaila, a tale haunted by sound. It describes a shadow of these ideas, a negative image of it, an anti-something.

Artist and teacher Samir Malik tells me, 'for Europeans, it might be helpful to think about concepts like Gaia. Akasha is the whole spirit of the earth. People say clairvoyants get their knowledge from the Akashic Record. Or you might think of Jung's collective unconscious. We come from one source—Akasha is the collective consciousness of that source. In Akashic reality, you might say, there is one dimension of space and three of time. You can go backwards or forwards. You may be able to access other realities. In the "Chronicle" all memories are stored.' 'In the Akasha everything is saved,' says Kapanadze, 'so it is all near to us now; all possibilities are present at once.'

The concept was brought to prominence in Europe by Rudolf Steiner. But Kapanadze is at pains to say, 'I am not interested in Steiner or the Anthroposophists. Some people see my work as esoteric, but I am not interested in the esoteric, I find those kinds of books a waste of time. Although some of the imagery relating to alchemy is very interesting.'

What she is interested in is theoretical physics. She directs me to the mathematicians Srinivasa Ramanujan, Bernhard Riemann, ('all is geometry') and Nathan Rosen. Diagrams of the Einstein-Rosen bridge and Riemann's 'minimal surface' have something in common with some of her drawings, including some in the 'Black and White' Drowings. 'There is poetry involved in the work of all great mathematicians,' says Jacques Maritain.

'I was always interested in death—but the idea of it should be something positive. It is with us.' The juxtaposition of images on a Kapanadze canvas suggests the simultaneity of all things. There is another world, or this one is part of another.

'The Akasha series started out with the title, "Ideal Death," which came instinctively. While making those paintings it occurred to me that this was really the Akasha Chronika idea. With the Akasha, there is no time. So is there also no death? A question too big to answer, of course.' But the paintings have no didacticism about them. Sigrid Schade, (in an essay on the Dance of Death works of Birgit Jürgenssen) says that in the West paintings about death have traditionally been associated with self-portraits. 'I don't believe in God, or heaven, or Satan, or any of this stuff,' says Kapanadze, 'but I'm interested in what death is. I am interested in what happens to us. Who knows, maybe we know more.' I am reminded Saul Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift, in which the writer dreams he meets Humboldt after he has died. 'Now I understand everything,' Humboldt says. Humboldt is Bellow's portrait of Delmore Schwartz. Kapanadze continues: 'but it's theoretical. And theoretical physics can only be theoretical—it can't be experimentally proved—and I like this. It is like art.' Different ideas of time have been looked at by many thinkers. Plotinus, Bergson, who influenced Deleuze, many others. Comparisons of Western and Eastern ideas about time may not always be helpful or accurate.

In Another Father 2 the central figure is nature—'our father'. He has roots and is eating a man. 'Nature eats us,' Kapanadze says. In Another Father 1 the central figure 'is a king.' He is transparent and made up of other elements, so that he is at first hard to make out. Such paintings put me in mind of a literary character—Rabelais' Quarêmeprenant, who is made up of objects and actions, like an abstract Archimboldo. He is Lent—an event, an institution: an abstract personified.

Kapil Jariwala, gallerist: 'in Hinduism abstracts are personified, everything has a face.' With death, 'personifications become narratives', writes Sigrid Schade, 'moral instructions for leading the virtuous life and dying artfully.' But while Kapanadze's interest in Hinduism and Buddhism can be aligned with her use of personifications of life, death and nature, her treatment of them avoids moral narrative.

'As children we are more sensitive to the subject of death, we take it more seriously,' says Kapanadze. 'At 25 I decided that "we are born in order to learn how to die." I hadn't read it anywhere, it came from me. My opinion hasn't changed. It is through the subject of death that Hinduism and Tibetan religions began to interest me. I think in this there is a difference between East and West.' Kapanadze turned her eye Eastward, and is interested in a comparison between West and East—however irresolvable. Part of the idea and the humour of the work lies in how a drawing might express such big things—as physicists' drawings try to do. For this very reason the drawings can be quite rough—the humour lies in the awareness of the difficulty. Kapanadze's interest in the Akasha concerns death, time, simultaneity, and a way of seeing 'the world of appearances', in the Platonic sense. 'I suppose it's optimistic.'

3. Biography

From her teenage years until the age of 30 Kapanadze wrote poetry. She also wrote a play. Her parents were both actors, and her mother in particular was very successful. 'In 1997 I wrote a film script for a competition in Tbilisi, in which only film directors were taking part, and won a commendation. Recently I thought this script could be a basis for a series of photographs.' When I met her she was about to embark on this project. She was also thinking about making photographs of actors' dressing rooms.
'I am a painter of solitude in a way, like a religious painter, to an extent, although I am not religious.' Here we might make a connection with Romanticism. 'Artists are born into a time but deal with timeless issues. I feel I am in communion with other artists alive or dead.' The list of artists she admires is enlightening. Max Ernst, Polke and de Chirico; Goya, Picabia, Tzara, Duchamp, Meret Oppenheim. Of younger artists, Laura Owens. Accurate if comic versions of scenes from Goya turn up in her sketchbooks, and she says working in series might have to do with his influence. Morandi's way of handling light particularly impresses her. There is a dialogue in her work with artists past and present. Of 20th century Georgian painters she mentions David Kakabadze, Alexander Bandzeladze, Gia Edzgveradze and Karlo Kacharava.

4. Methods and motifs

Umberto Eco says the visual is used to connect the learned and the popular. Humour is vital to Kapanadze's work, with its allusions to cartoons, diagrams, past artists' work. Humour has always had a relationship with conceptual art, which often uses the structure of the joke—two things juxtaposed to make a third unexpected thing. The comic believes the world to be unfathomable and ridiculous, even though he or she would like to explain it.
Paintings like Crazy Head or The Critic's Gaze (2009) seem to be about language—whatever else they are about. Since her compositions have no edges to them, the composition lies in the lines and shapes. In Ideal Death 3, the motifs arrive stage left, move across the canvas and disappear stage right. This way of composing also has to do with the transparency of the motifs—where they overlap, the motif on top does not obscure the one beneath. The figures are a little like X-rays—a medium that sees through things, which is photographic, but makes us think of diagrams—and seems to have something to do with shadows. As for the purpose of X-rays—in Kapanadze biology is never far away.
There is also a collage effect. Pages from the sketchbook are, so to speak, cut and pasted to make a composition. The motifs, the themes, are from the same well. It is like a poem series which goes over the artist's interests in variations. For more recent paintings Kapanadze has also used cut-out templates. The tension between the composition as a whole and the separate drawings that make it up, allows for play with ideas of coherence and incoherence, which can be comic—or sometimes Gothic.
'Living things—figures, animals, plants are shown in an almost ornamental way. They represent everything in the world that we see.' The animals include dogs, bears and birds: ostriches, parrots, owls. They are frequently symmetrical, or positioned symmetrically in relation to one another. 'They might be heraldic animals,' she says, 'and I like the fact that heraldic devices are also like Rorschachs.' Heraldry also has to do with time, being about genealogy. 'I lay out the images, the narrative if you like, which is in my head. The story is up to you.'

The 'candle-people' in the paintings represent life: 'a person burns like a candle.' And the cakes, 'because a person's life is like a cake'—made to be consumed. 'Time is the fire in which we burn' as Delmore Schwartz says. There are lot of spirals in the paintings—things apparently in motion, or in flame. Are the paintings about energy and matter? Or these and art? Between energy and matter, energy has primacy, Kapanadze says. They are not allegorical. They might be in a line from Symbolism. They are 'against limits' as Kapanadze says. 'Dreams are important. Maybe the drawings made by 'automatic drawing' come from dreams. Also it's important to realise that our brain conceives in images and without them we cannot communicate.'

The background colour is always monochrome. It is made by mixing wood glue with pigment. This background—which is really no background, just a base, or sky—enables her to compose scenes which are neither interior nor landscape. Direction is defined by the motifs. If anything they are landscapes—like the fantastic landscapes of the Romantics, and the Surrealist ones influenced by them. There is not much that you would call sunlight. It is the light of, say, John Martin's Belshazzar's Feast of 1820—the light of storms and visions. Are Kapanadze's paintings apocalyptic? 'Yes.'

'I always want to find new ways to think and to approach things. That's why I learnt German. And in art the language you're using is never enough.' Dealing with time involves dealing with identity. Things in her pictures have opposites or partners, or are linked by chords. 'All are male and female, all double.' What kind of a division is this? Energy and matter? Perhaps the binary itself, indicated then questioned. Of course symmetry indicates the body, which has always been important in her work. Here bodies are on fire, are hybrids, or feature in cameos in corners. In Akasha Chronika 5 there is a cape on a stand. 'The cape looks like a person, a body, and even has eyes, but it is an empty shell, a mould, like the shell in which the mussel once lived. A person was inside it.'

The motifs are painted over the finished background. The base colour of each painting consists of up to fifteen layers of wood glue mixed with pigment. She can put motifs between the translucent layers—drawings or geometrical patterns. Then these rather emblematic drawings or patterns are definitely 'background', and importantly create a depth which affects the whole painting, which might otherwise look too flat and diagrammatic. The floating effect is important. In 'Another Father 2’ depth is created with the pale forest of trees (with added wind effects) but enhanced by layers of almost transparent paint: motifs seem to move toward you from background to foreground. The effect is added to by glitter in layers near the surface. Her methods result in paintings with a tactile, thick surface, a waxy eggshell finish. The backgrounds provide something fixed for the nervous and informal drawing to come.

Kapanadze points out that there are two kinds of light in the works—in the translucent monochrome and in the luminous filigree of the drawings on top. The meeting of these two brings another kind of light. The colour is luminous, like sparks, embers; phosphorescent like Coleridge's water snakes. (Or, for example, like the colours in Theodor von Holst's Fantasy based on Goethe's Faust, of 1834.) Kapanadze says it is a question of having 'enough light to see the idea.' It is not the 'real world' we are dealing with, the world of appearances. 'Each painting is lit internally,'—as if from phosphorescent sources. 'When background and foreground work together the painting works.'

5. Forests, Romanticism

'One theme that runs through Ernst's entire oeuvre is the forest—the epitome and atmospheric space of German Romanticism,' writes Ingo Borges. Perhaps via Surrealism—and Goya—Kapanadze's Akasha paintings show the influence of the Romantics. Of all the Surrealists, Ernst was the one the most influenced by the Romanticism of the 18th and 19th centuries. 'Ernst felt intensely drawn all his life to the art of the German Romantics,' says Borges. It is worth pointing out that Hinduism was brought into the Gothic in the 19th century, especially into literature.

The issues addressed by Kapanadze have, arguably, much in common with those addressed by the Romantics and by the Gothic—the idea of the inner vision, of the subjective as a starting point for philosophical analysis, of the imagination as a force unifying everything. Possibly even the idea of an identity built around a sense of loss, defined or undefined.

The sense of being in a forest is felt in a number of pieces—sometimes a literal forest, as in Another Father 2. Sometimes it is conjured by the lack of horizon, the darkness, the animals and plants. Of the owls in her paintings, Kapanadze says, 'owls are beautiful, intelligent, and active at night: that is, mysterious.' The light often suggests the night: as in Ideal Death 1, Another Father 1, Ideal Death 5 and Akasha Chronicle 2.

Roland Borgards writes, 'the Romantics conceived of night as the space of a different and better cognition.' And in Ludwig Tieck's writings, for example, 'Darkness has become an emotional state, the "black infinity." The outer night has become an inner one and also a metaphor for the soul.'

6. The Black and White drawings

Romanticism and the Gothic also featured the meeting of science and mysticism. The black drawings—the 'Black and White' drawings, a series spanning a period from 1983 to 2006—are in many ways the precursors to the Akasha works. They are like blueprints, as if the artist were an inventor. Sometimes they seem to show pathways or levels. But these pictures seem also out amongst the stars of the night sky. The black is the black 'a better cognition'. There are often large amounts of text, apparently adapted from scientific diagrams. Humour reigns throughout. The drawings consist of white lines applied to a black ground of ink or gouache. In one there are diagrams of what might be a physicist's analysis of space, alongside the Latin names of parrots and parakeets. It represents both an idea of nature, and a way of making art: an important pairing.

What is Kapanadze's view of nature, in the traditional meaning of the word? 'We are all the same in one way. Humans ask questions but apart from that—we don't know what kind of consciousness a bear has, for example. It may be substantially the same as ours.'

'In the past I often—not always—used as sources books on medicine and other technical books. Or, for example, the instructions on how to get on a horse. They then lost their function in the absurd context of my drawings. They were transformed—just the idea of a purpose remained. I started using books on theoretical physics—in which there are in the end no answers, only more questions—like in art.'

The 'Black and White Drawings' seem to show processes of thought. There are squares within squares and numbers suggesting different possibilities, semi-scientific drawings combining physics, animals and instructions. Kapanadze's 'favorite' shows what looks like a tool for grasping things, which is also like a person. In her work people and things are often hybridised. These drawings also bear a comparison with photography, with their sense of being in negative, and the feeling they give of an attempt to record and define.

It would be a mistake to connect her motifs, here or in the paintings, with 'folk' imagery. Kapanadze's work shows an idea of international, art-historical motifs. Hers are not Georgian folk motifs, even if the situation here is complex. When for example I ask her if there she was influenced by the Georgian tradition of carpet and rug-making, she says no, at least not directly. She allows that there might be some influence of these and other forms of applied art, and that her paintings do have a similar form, to an extent. These rugs belong to a long tradition and feature elaborate motifs, with arabesques, figures, animals, plants. She also says she is not influenced by Georgian ecclesiastical imagery. Again, 'certainly not directly. The influence of Hindu imagery is clear.'

Perhaps the theatre is a more important influence than many others. There is something of the stage set about the paintings, and an emphasis on movement, with one or two characters dominating the stage of the canvas. Her 'internal light, enough light to see the idea', might be theatrical lighting. In a short text published in the catalogue 'Not Only Hands but Shoulders', Kapanadze describes her experience of being in an empty theatre and gazing at the stage, which appears to her as 'the gate into a cosmos where an endless world begins, a world where mega- and micro-galaxies are created, a world extracting life from empty space and re-dispersing it like dust into darkness.'

7. 'The earth is evil'

In André Malraux's discussion of East and West, and of where the West finds itself, he writes, 'what is being called into question again [by modern Western art] is the value of the world of appearances.' Appearances meaning what we see: reality as it appears, the world, nature. This fact of Modern art, and its relation to the question of the nature of the world in Hindu and Buddhist thinking and art, is something Kapanadze understands. This, I think, is something of a key to her work.

'Nature is death,' says Kapanadze, 'the earth is evil.' Malraux says that 'in India and the Far East appearance is identified with illusion—in other words, with evil—"evil" in the metaphysical, not the Christian sense—and all Eastern art is a victory over the lie of the cosmos.' Kapanadze's 'evil' is I think meant in this sense—although it may not be simple, both senses might be mixed in. She is something of a Platonist, although the style of the drawing has the effect of earthing the work. But in terms of Malraux on Eastern art, and 'the world is evil,' we can think that there is a little of Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia—'the world is evil, no one will miss it' (really a Christian idea of evil) and a large dose of 'the world of appearances is illusory' (the Eastern view).

8. 'The world of the imagination is greater than real world'

'The world of the imagination is greater than real world,' Kapanadze says. In The Kingdom of Poetry Delmore Schwartz says that,

'. . . . Poetry is certainly/More interesting, more valuable,/.../Than Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, the Atlantic Ocean/And other much admired natural phenomena./It is useful as light, and as beautiful./.../For poetry magnifies and heightens reality:/.../For poetry is, in a way, omnipotent;/.../For without poetry, reality is speechless or incoherent...'

For poetry we can read art, of course. Maritain: 'by Poetry I mean not the particular art which consists in writing verses, but...that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human Self.'

In Schwartz's story The Statues, snow falls in New York to form sculptures on the streets and sidewalks. Schwartz found here a new way of expressing, in his typical comic-serious mode, his belief in the importance of art. The effect of the statues on the populace is profound:

'... they looked about as if they were dream struck or abstracted or profoundly in love...It seemed to Faber Gottschalk [the story's hero] that the statues had an inexhaustible nature.'

'Some for a time spoke of the fecundity of nature; some...thought that this was indeed the way that the haunted and hunted lives of human beings took shape by an unpredictable and continuous fall to which little or no designing agency could be attributed.'

So art—in an apparently unusual aesthetic—is seen here as both natural phenomenon and something greater than nature. People are seen in the same way. They are formed as if by the falling snow, subject to the backgrounds of their parents, the place they are born, their genes, and so on. But although a person's personality happens, it is also hers. (The question of choice in Schwartz is a vexed one. He is, as Alex Runchman says, 'the poet of uncertainty.')

People, natural phenomena and art are contemplated according to the same philosophical rules. There is more than a nod to Plato and his ideal forms. It is as if reality had fallen from heaven. Schwartz studied under AN Whitehead who taught that an artist's ability to perceive with pure sense perceptions may be a higher form of perception than that using causal relations to perceive things. The chair is more than a chair.

Faber Gottschalk says of the statues, 'who knows what relationship they may not have to our lives? What natural or supernatural powers may not, through them, be signing to us?'

Art is creation—perhaps Schwartz believed not that 'nothing is new under the sun' but the reverse, that we are 'sub-creators', as some theologians say, and that artists are all the time making genuinely new things, being made in God's image. Kapanadze has something of this faith in the powers of the artist, who produces new and meaningful things as if from nowhere, who draws on mystery. 'In some ways I think the artist is a medium, a clairvoyant.' And paintings are not things to be translated—the painting is the thing, not its interpretation. Art is a thing with a power and nature of its own, a will of its own.

If Kapanadze's 'automatism' is not really such in the Surrealist sense, it may be the idea of a relationship between the artist and nature—nature in the broadest sense—and not a relationship with the unconscious, as in Surrealism. Rabelais speaks of 'monsters deformed and distorted from contempt for Nature.' Nature may be 'evil', or 'illusory', but at the same time a sense of nature—to include the world as understood by theoretical physics—is vital to Kapanadze's art and thinking. She is not really against nature, or reality, any more than Schwartz is. But reality is nothing without art. The 'story' of her drawings, and the paintings they flower into, is ours to interpret, she says. All of this points to this: that nature and reality are impossible to fathom. And that art, in Jacques Maritain's words, 'is a kind of divination (as was realised in ancient times...)'

We may call some artists “relentless souls”, not because their souls move their bodies around incessantly, making sure they are constantly active in all situations in life – even if this may to some extent be a necessary part of their relentlessness! The relentless nature of these artistic souls lies in the fact that they never stop asking questions – questions on what kind of life will await us when we finally get there (without having ever agreed to going!). These artists ask questions about life in its future or invisible incarnations, but also about life in its very real, substantial manifestations. The bandwidth and intensity of this mental activity are based on a specific life experience, on a life lived in a way that people like to describe using the words “honest” and “full”. What this is about is a life lived with eyes wide open. And in living this way, not focusing on those cultural phenomena that may currently be all the rage, on arranging one’s life comfortably or creating a lucrative professional position, but instead focusing on pulsating life and its most urgent questions. It is these questions that give rise to real art with true, deep roots (and shoots), an art that knows no compromise.

Asking fundamental questions in the Soviet Union, in a land where everything had to be known, was not easy. Marxism already knew everything about the world ... and the things Marxism didn’t know had also been established. And so the people knew everything: Who they were, where they came from, where they were going (spoken with Gauguin). It became difficult to ask questions under these circumstances, but if someone managed to do so anyway (using his or her talent), then he or she was confronted with questions on all levels. This was because in the land of the Soviets, all of the characteristics of a “heroic Soviet existence” were subsumed under the template of concrete knowledge. This text is meant to provide an insight into the conditions that govern the life of Georgian artist Keti Kapanadze and her attitude to life.

Keti has been living in Germany for the past 15 years. She emigrated, leaving behind a country in which contemporary art could only ever be a weak alternative to the official “Socialist Realism” as decreed and safeguarded by the state. This “Socialist Realism” aimed to inspire artists to make works promulgating the glory of the Soviet way of life and its special future, as the Communist leaders and theorists saw it. In this society, art had become degraded to the status of an instrument and had to serve “the greater good” according to a small group of people, namely, the Communists. This approach strictly negated individual questions. In fact, it denied any question marks whatsoever that dared to venture into the space beyond the sphere of influence of the totalitarian Soviet epistemology. This determinate reality created a society in which people saw themselves as mere parts of an enormous body. The most important thing for this body was to preserve itself as living quarters and to create the best conditions for future prosperity within these living quarters. This approach to art without eyes and ears created an incestuous society, where everything was everyone’s concern and everyone had the right to intrude on everyone else’s life. When already living in Germany, Keti answered a correspondent’s question as to why she had emigrated in a brief and succinct way: “You can’t live in a society where everyone is allowed to poke their finger into your liver and the relationships between people are one single pulp.”

In this strangely constricted society, the dissenting creative fraction was split into two camps, both of whom resisted state politics. The first creative camp (in the center of the country) fought directly against the regime (Moscow Conceptualism) and tried to destabilize and deconstruct the foundations of the visual language used by the regime. This form of art-making provided a strong political counterbalance. On the periphery (Keti was born in Georgia), instead was practiced certain saloon style adjusted towards the official Soviet patterns. (Ill XX). This was a remnant of historical-ethnic tradition in visual art brought in line with the ideals fostered by the state – a compromise tolerated by the authorities in service of the Communist idea of the “self-determination of the nations”. (Ill. XX) And so, free-thinking creative work in the province had to resist two “mannerist” tendencies at once – the official Soviet and the traditional ethnic one. In the Georgian province, where the yoke of the regime did not particularly provoke artists, free thinking was not aimed at resisting the state, but at an introverted questioning of the self. The main concern was to question one’s own metaphysical foundations. These problems were of central importance to a small group of Georgian underground artists in the 1980s, which Keti belonged to.

Keti therefore devoted the first, Georgian phase of her young artistic work to questions concerning the nature of the space that she had so “inconsiderately been inserted into” (to use her own expression). What this pertains to is not banal social reality, but its ontological precondition – the “symbolic succession” creating the mental image of the world in human consciousness. This image is based in the belief that every form of the present is founded on binary opposites (which explains the artist’s obsession with the problem of black and white during this creative period). (Ill. XX) During that time, in her works Keti tried to deconstruct the system of terms and values based on the hierarchical structures of this dichotomy. With the instinct of a contemporary artist she pounced on the opportunity to destabilize everything rooted in these structures. She mixed up the signifiers and stripped them of their ground, invested them with absurd meanings, compared logically incomparable significations and poeticized schematic illustrations and drawings (from textbooks). By doing so, her visual works gave the beauty and the possibilities for re-interpretation inherent in the drawings expression independently of their meanings and use. (Ill. XX). She presented these operations on silent, anonymous, cosmic black backgrounds that breathe without needing any kind of movement (by finding endless possibilities for working with the black surface of a picture) – placing the white line on these backgrounds like a transcendental wound.

The absurd poetry of this series can be construed as a part of the progressive dynamic Heidegger termed poiesis. - When a phenomenon (human consciousness in the present case), completely and perfectly formed in itself, nears its total de-functionalization in an absolutely fundamental metaphor. The absurd aspect of the driving force behind this process (our inner world, our consciousness wanting to find its new, undetermined form) is not determined by the restrictive “human” scale in this black-and-white series.

The series has a fundamental thrust and could thus have been developed ad infinitum. But humans are humans and artists are artists precisely because they do not move or grow in straight lines, but in curves, spirals or zigzags, sometimes jumping forwards, sometimes backwards. In Keti’s case, the next step led her to specific issues that were no less existential but of a much more personal nature. She began questioning her own identity and human identity in general and started to challenge the goals and accomplishments of social culture.

Even in her early years, Keti intuitively and intellectually felt that this metaphysics was somehow connected to the phallic discourse - and that Logos per se carried the mark of the latter.

Her next series is made up of medium-format, shiny metal objects. For the most part, these are nickel-cut digits, arranged to humorously form the same theme over and over again – a phallus. Her artistic genius brought together chic, glamour, seduction and ... the rigor of the phallic Eros in the glow of the metallic bas-relief of the “numerical phallus”. (Ill. XX)

The endless row of digits playfully dances across the background and in its ornaments and arabesques produces the penis-like object repeatedly. The piece points to the absolutely decisive nature of this phenomenon beyond time and space – the phallus, placed at the center of our cultural determination. Human fate is full of irony – we just have to open our eyes and see it: Because Keti had no adequate artistic context (there was no infrastructure supporting free artistic experimentation in Georgia at the time), she emigrated to the West in search for a fruitful cultural environment and left her latest work, the phallic series, to her sad homeland as a memento.

When she arrived in the West, Keti used her keen perception to sound out the field of issues that engaged contemporary Western art. As it turned out, at the time the art world in the West was primarily concerned with art that looked at “identity” in all its various aspects. Postmodernism pointed to the ethnic narratives as a counterbalance to the big narratives. It focused on everyday life and the cultural idiosyncrasies of specific social groups, as opposed to the appearance of global international and cosmopolitan cultural phenomena. But the main point here is that, thanks to her artistic intuition, Keti managed to establish a meta-position within this new complex of themes in response to all the new tendencies that suddenly confronted her. She never revealed her attitude towards the world, which she had found early on and extended since, and which was based on the lyricism of the absurd. She thereby merely saw a magical reality in the philosophical jumble described above – the reality of futility. The strength of artistic individuality lies in being able to provide a personal verdict on the time the artist lives in, its metamorphoses and ways of thinking. One could say that Keti managed to do just that in her work. Because of her own experience of de-personalized (monotype) society, Keti responded to the Western surge towards pluralist models with twice the enthusiasm. What is the name, what is the function and what is the predestination? And how does all of this correspond with human nature and gender affiliation? Keti has been addressing these questions in bemused and playful ways since arriving in the West. She colored six copies of the same black-and-white passport photograph, printed it on canvas (Ill. XX), achieving various results from the monotype, dull image: a venerated pharaoh, an anonymous nomad, a black slave, a subject in the style of the “mummy portrait”, a flâneur wearing a top hat, and so on. Keti plays a game with us that lies outside of time – identity, she says, is a social convention, is world theatre. The roles are essentially of equal value, appearances and their charm are just ephemeral trumpery, whose beauty lies in just that, its ephemeral, flighty nature.

But in all of her artistic analyses during this period, feminism is her main topic. It is not by chance that critic Gary Schwalb wrote about Keti at the time: “The center of contemporary underground art in Russia has shifted to Georgia, and one of the most interesting artists to emerge from this new scene is concept artist Keti Kapanadze – the first Georgian artist to work with feminist topics.”

In the first part of the photo series young, beautiful men with bare upper bodies stand in front of a golden, shimmering background and gaze into the camera assertively. (Ill. XX) They hold up white pieces of paper with sentences in black letters: intellectual phrases with a claim to understanding the deeper meaning of the world. These boys are powerful: they have golden light, erotic strength, wisdom – everything belongs to them, it is their world (the world of boys and men): this world presents itself as being forceful, strong and smiling. The texts these young men hold up, these black letter-ornaments on white, barely hide a deep confusion and anxiety: meaning is such an uncertain thing, and it cares for neither law nor justice. Meaning that we are left with an irony again: this irony is the most important factor, together with the great sadness that the two following parts of this three-part series unveils.

In part two of the series (Ill. XX) a young woman’s legs hang above the ground... she has either hung herself or someone has lifted her up and won’t let her back down! Beautiful young legs, but already quite blue, maybe they really do belong to a woman who has taken her own life, or is someone ridiculing her? The background is blurred and out of focus. Effectively, the only thing we see are the feet with badly cut, scruffy toenails – as teenagers would have. Teenagers, who see the world in a blur because they are still so young. Could it be that the independent and individual life of a female person is over at this age? Maybe at this age the fairy-like creatures are hung in the space of patriarchal society, where spaces and roles of female presence are strictly divided and men are always better and wiser – and men also command desire and lust, which is why they appear in front of a gold background in Keti’s work.

In the third part of the series (Ill. XX) we see beautiful, refined female bodies – sensuous, shy, ready to serve, play or surrender themselves – but without heads. Have the heads been sent to some transcendental sphere, lest they see the world? The female’s heads are encased in white draperies, in a way that transforms these beautiful creatures into ghosts – docile, harmless ghosts of course. How has the patriarchy managed to achieve this transformation? A lot of effort went into this achievement – for thousands of years – because the heads had just started to grow out of the white drapery, about a hundred years ago... and this is what Keti worries about.

Of course Keti also noticed these castrated heads in Georgia, where they exist in great numbers. She shows how she sees their fate in Western Civilization in the photo series titled “Territorial Disorder”. Here, Keti has bravely donned the roles of actress, photographer and choreographer all at once. The artist found a former, abandoned provincial but “chic” supermarket in a German country town that had not been locked, and decided to use it as the set for a photo series. (Ill. XX) The bleak, pseudo-luxurious supermarket space seems ever the more claustrophobic due to the empty shelves and racks, the dim lighting and tobacco-green wall paint (that does a great job at conveying the effect of stuffy air). Here, we see the artist, in many reincarnations and nothing but her underwear, running confusedly through the space, walking around, in the various rooms of the supermarket. Sometimes the figures Keti portrays are running away, sometimes they are trying to hide or defend themselves, panicked and hysterical. But what they are defending themselves against is not the oppressive supermarket space but odd, semi-transparent ghosts of our patriarchal cultural paradigm hanging in the air. These are prophets or visionaries, scholars, some kinds of aliens or simple-naive gnomes – remnants from childhood fairytales and dreams. These ghostly dolls hanging in the air sum up the entire cultural surrogate of paradigms that our poor phallic culture feeds women and instruct them in, instead of casting them upon the world of open, overflowing possibilities provided by a life of questioning. What we can take away from this photo series shot in the supermarket (a symbol of our “living environment”) is the state of being tempted by a space of consumption that is fundamentally closed-off, that has no exit points and in which we find only the illusion of an involvement with specific suggestions delivered by patriarchal culture. This is the artist’s intuitive assessment of the fate of women in Western society.

As Keti writes in her diary: “I began to make art during the Communist era. Guided by my inner voice I knew that I had to resist everything that was imposed on me from outside: Georgian national cultural standards and the traditional ethnic/historical patterns of imagery, as well as Georgian habits and, perhaps most importantly, Communist ideology and iconography. The cultural information we were receiving from the West was so sparse that this in itself already looked like a conceptual art work that I had to unpack and complete in my imagination.”

“This sparse information conveyed a hint of the imagery of contemporary Western culture to our consciousness – and we supplied the rest in our imagination. This constructed image of Western culture was strongly determined by a feeling of an enormous difference between two controversial worlds – ours and the Western one.”

“On arriving in the West I began to see clearly – the real difference was not at all what I had been imagining, and my preconceptions turned out to be just my subjective vision…”

Keti understood then that all of her previous thoughts on how she had imagined the West to be had rested on the banal principle of inversing reality and that there really is no heaven on earth. The Soviet dissidents had simply made up the Western moon. This existential melancholia reached its high point in the works she made in Paris.

Keti was in Paris, by herself, working unwaveringly. She noticed that melancholia cannot be conceptualized and found she needed the pain that only painting could convey. (Ill. XX) And so, Keti painted, and she painted with a deep, touching sorrow. Her emotive and theatrical paintings and sketches from this period exhibit the entire spectrum of melancholic nuances. These include the beautiful longing for unburdened, spread-out space and a tense anticipation while looking into the future or just into the unknown. We also see sadness at the frustrated ideals that once towered above us with their pompous silhouettes. (Ill. XX) We find a dormant instinct here that can sniff out the ontological roots of our “existence”. In these works we also find our deep-seated need to be an indispensable part of everything, of an undivided whole! These touching paintings and sketches reveal the beauty of suffering – but not just the beauty, also its hidden creative potential.

Keti returned to Germany from Paris. She was tired of being serious and sincere. Upon her return, all she wanted to do was play, prank, make jokes and be ironic. She wanted to stick her tongue out at the world and most of all, address her deep, soulful, aching feelings, and say to them: Free yourselves, dance, sing – don’t grow old before your time, we are yet to show the world what kind of shenanigans and jolts humans can administer to the sclerotic structures of meaning that we all live with.

This new-found attitude resulted in a new body of work, a new stage in Keti’s oeuvre: An oddly subjective variety of Pop Art, in which sorrow and pain gain a shiny surface for the viewer’s gaze to glide across, with flat ornamental silhouettes of figures that are almost comics but that never lose a hidden connection to gravity and grief.(Ill. XX) A little bear, a watering pot, a doggy, a cottage, the tousled cleaning lade – all of them reminiscent of early photographs of the artist’s dolls, with but one important difference: on the photos, the dolls were surrounded by hostile empty space and sharply lit from above, lit with a light that distorts the soul. But here, in these Pop paintings, everything is pleasing to the eye and seduces us, appeals to our sensual side. However, as soon as the viewer is seduced and swoons over these paintings, he or she is suddenly confronted with sharp corners, cul-de-sacs and barriers and therefore quickly thrown back to reality. We suddenly notice, then, that frippery, sheen and laughter are just on the surface, and what lies beneath are the same endlessly repeated anonymous structures, pale, faceless and stereotypical: the barred and closed-off reality of our grey every day.

At this point, a period commenced for the artist in which she wanted to take stock of everything she had previously seen, lived through and experienced. She calls the experience expressed in her current body of paintings Akasha (sanskrit for “cosmic universal memory”). (Ill. XX) These large-format paintings have backgrounds made up of deep, flat planes of color covered in countless ornaments (reminiscent of convolutions of the brain) of intertwined figures: humans, animals, objects, arabesques, lines and stains. All of this is held on the painting surface by a mystical background space that seems to be breathing from within the depth of the painting. This burlesque of figures is quite possibly a symphony, a roundelay or a hymn to existence or already a hymn to post-existence. Collectively, these paintings praise that we have happened upon by chance (as stated at the beginning of this text), that we have already lived through or are living through at the moment or that we will live through at some point in the future. This hymn to existence proclaims, now as it has in the past and as it will do in the future, that love should triumph. This means that we should give our strength and talent completely and without asking for payment, and that we should never betray this question mark bringing us closer to the truth! Keti’s entire oeuvre has nursed this question and still does so. The question that does not look at everybody around, does not look back, but neither does it look forward, because it wants to see the future within itself, in order to let awe and the question mark in the soul grow!

And now I wonder: What will Keti do next? Which irrational expression will the artist’s creative drive think up in order to explore the possibilities of existence, of our social structures or her own soul? We will need to wait for the answer, but without doubt we can already say that soon, a new facet of truth will flare up in the world – it is just a question of time. (Ill. XX)

Keti Kapanadze produced in Paris in 2008 and 2009 a series of feverishly embellished, insouciant paintings that can be appreciated immediately for their sensorial resonance, their layered luminosity, and for their distinctive tenor and tone.  These singular, idiosyncratically vibrant works, made in an atelier in front of Pont Marie between Rue de l’Hotel de Ville and Notre Dame and in the far vicinity of the Centre Georges Pompidou, were the result of Kapanadze’s having received a residency scholarship, administered by the Kulturministerium Badem-Wurttemberg from the Institut Français in Stuttgart and under the auspices of the Citė International des Arts-Paris.

What is clear from the outset is that the artist is drawn to presenting spatial and emotional conundrums. The Paris paintings are, as a whole, sensually poetic and unsettling, discursively excessive in their deployment of unruly signifiers that suggest an influx of involuntary memory which takes the shape of crudely drawn outlines of the likes of buildings or container vessels, as well as rough sketches of heads, animals, ballerina dolls, household goods pertaining to domestic agendas (that is “female work”), Buddha statues. And yet with all of this activity circulating vividly throughout each work, the series as a whole is hardly pure expressionism for the artist has managed by careful reduction and editing to interject a strong measure of deliberateness into the mix. The visual energy is one of casual intensity blended with attitudinal gestures that bespeak of being ill at ease and a desire to escape or to counter these susceptibilities. Such transgressive impulses on the part of the artist point to a need to dissent, to strike back, at propriety and the strictures of established norms --- a measure of defiance against what Freud calls “the reality principle” meaning the world of adult obligations and responsibilities.

Kapanadze builds up layered, conflated image-systems that are remarkably dissimilar to one another. In so doing she creates engagingly spry, elusive paintings that are anything but arbitrarily constructed while creating the sensation of being whimsically conceived. A comedic haplessness, a loopy abject quality, seems to predominate at first. This sensation of litheness of spirit has a welcoming easiness to it and they appear to be open-handed in how accessible they are. These forms or figures give the impression that they are quickly fashioned as if they were generated like automatic writing: spectral, enervated configurations or garnishes. These paintings at first glance appear to have a childlike, innocent, or naïve quality. This is partially due to the epigrammatic quality of some of the mark-making that produces sketch-like forms or doodles that seem to drift in and out of focus, mentally speaking. These images punctuate the pictorial plane and interpenetrate the layers Kapanadze works so hard to create (as in Bügeleisenschein, or Flying Buddhas) in what one might call an incidental fashion.

Some of these forms have an out-of-control vestigial quality to them (as in the apparitional face-like form on the left in Window Cleaner) and together with the distinctive hallucinatory component they are also compelling due to the overall oneiric character of the work. In this regard The Critic's Gaze is a good example of the artist’s capacity to easily conflate the direct with the oblique, of the provisional and of the incomplete are put into play through a visual language adept at giving substance to digressionary passages, sub-texts, and competing narratives.  The Polke-like other-world playfulness that we sense, initially, in Kapanadze’s work, that teasing-quality, is replaced by an overall brooding mood, an anxiousness that tries to dispel itself by focusing on small incidentals, creating distraction patterns if you will, as if to ward off evil spirits. One of these formal propitiatory devices she uses again and again is her pitting her anomalous, unpredictable, set of imagistic characters (and, often, ambiguous figural formations), squiggling against backdrops of continuity and regularity.

The artist uses scale effectively to trigger various sensations verging from the comical to the sinister. Her forms while having a caricature or cartoon like quality that might have assumes an emblazoned childlike quality in one passage when they assume an intimate or toy-like presence and other forms take on grotesque or demonic qualities when they dominate the canvas as in Parrots’ Heaven.

In so doing the artist appears in her Paris paintings to bring to bear mixed emotions pointing to the need to be an adult yet also to revert to a time of childlike innocence. If there is a melancholic tinge to this series of works in general it might be because the artist longs, perhaps, to show that she wishes to be bewitched by the pangs of nostalgia (homesickness)  --- or the desire for utopia, or for oneness with Nature --- yet cannot succumb entirely to its entreaties. Tannenbaumtopf will serve as is an additional example from others that highlights Kapanadze’s improvisational capacities, as it pits heterogeneous elements against stabilizing homogeneous ones such as repetitive and often encrypted iconography. In doing so the artist suggests a fantasy of different, asymmetrical worlds convulsively co-existing or coping with each other in uneasy alliances.  Kapanadze uses surface tension and a display of different oppositional marks that appear to be shorthand for a conflation of perhaps conflicted sensibilities or reactions to elemental naturalness. Here, the artist’s visual suggestion of trees being cooked in a pot invariably suggests a nature/culture impasse reminiscent of Levi-Strauss’s approach to considerations of the raw and the cooked, as he suggests we have been so removed from elementary connections to nature because of technological advancements in which how we live, eat and think comes through as processed and as a result we are at remove from nature proper and this distanciation is now constitutive of modern living. The background of this painting offers a sequence of forms alluding to a scientific illustration pertaining perhaps to hermetic or specialized knowledge, inferring a code of sequencing or genetic or biologic  (re)structuring be it atoms or molecules at the service of bio-engineering. In essence this work, elliptical and saturated with ambiguity as it is, seems to suggest the artist’s concern is to emphasize that care and mindfulness be extended over the field of scientific engagement with hybridizing nature.

In her artist notes Kapanadze writes: “… After 30 years I was planning to begin my new series of painting where I imagined to combine controversial layers: geometry, which refers to metaphysics and ornamental burlesque of human memory or to say simply old wounds and bouncy surface…I remembered magical moments of my childhood and wanted to have something similar to bring into life.” Additionally the paintings have remarkable qualities in terms of tonal and retinal effects as the artist took pains to create a layered, palimpsest effect in which these various color layers seems to interpenetrate, giving off a unreal, dream-like aura to the overall compositions. The artist, in her notes, writes: “I used special glue putting into it pigments and applied this to the canvas. It was only after the first layer had dried that I could see the result of my labors, what color would take hold and in what intensity. I could proceed only incrementally as each layer had to dry completely before I could proceed. Each day I could only color 4 square meters of surface and would do so 5 or 6 times…”

Visual cues in the form of a repetition compulsion for propitiatory measures to satiate or mollify anxiousness or melancholy seem evident, and are salutary to the total effect of each painting. Kapanadze’s visual and tonal structuring that incorporates layering, repetition and transgressive shifts from a position of ambient rectitude into an attitude that is defiantly insurrectional. This shift is exemplified by the artist’s pungent counter-insurgent use of a punky graphic expression --- to create what I will call zones of visual glossolalia. One might surmise perhaps that such visual concoctions were induced partly as a means for Kapanadze to come to terms with her new Parisian surroundings, visual coping mechanisms made manifest to allow the formation of newly-expansive ideational and affective associations --- a libidinal economy in the service of encouraging a rush of freshly new imaginal flows but also, perhaps in a residual way, as an attempted means of brushing aside, pre-empting, yawning chasms of morbidity attending an incipient low-grade depressed sensibility. What have been inspired as a result are artworks that quiver with instinctual fervor. A delirious admixture of gleeful abandon, anxiousness and ennui predominates.

Daring to read-into the character and quality of the artist’s self-reflections as they were deployed toward the completion of this series of works engages projection on my part and is therefore hubristic at best. Similarly, for me to try to suggest what might have provoked such reflections in the mind of the artist in the space of more than half-a-decade ago arises out of the field of informed conjecture. Yet conjecture remains. Because, after all: who knows, really? Perhaps even the artist has mis-remembered or mis-identified or plainly forgotten which mental cues or psychical prompts were at play or responded to in part or in whole, precisely, between 2008 and 2009, so as to give the end-result in the form of this body of work produced in France. In regards to creative activity and artistic intentionality, is it not D.H. Lawrence who once cautioned: Don’t trust the teller, trust the tale?

What is not at all under doubt is that the vitality underlying Keti Kapanandze’s Paris paintings is the result of the complexity that emanates from the work. Such complexity results from the play of the contradictions in the work. Kapanandze’s Paris paintings are the products of a mindful and adaptable sensibility that is vigilant in its experimenting and risk-taking. Yet at the same time there is a capacity for enjoyment, release and exuberant wonderment. Kapanandze’s frame of mind while in Paris persists in holding in abeyance or in suspension attributes pertaining to jouissance, free will, the non-intellective, and the unconscious --- signified by Kapanadze’s use of recurring quirky and often, but not exclusively, sketch-like, or doodle-like graphic figurative or figural elements. These free-wheeling elements appear suspended, hovering or animated against the artist’s application of the codes of systematic over-determinism --- identifiable as a use of relaxed, yet stylized patterned motifs. These ornamental motifs serve as backdrops holding in check and emphasizing the more impulsive visual glossolalia.

Keti Kapanadze’s paintings produced in Paris near the end of this new century’s first decade galvanizes two dialectical aspects of inner-directedness:  her paintings bear the marks of playful fancifulness, even of the carnivalesque, yet at the same time her pictorial rebus-inspired scenes seem highly organized, grounded in the present and in the routineness of the everyday. The paintings have a pronounced effect on this viewer: they appear to be “easy” reads at first. They are understandable and penetrable. And yet after such initial euphoria the mind starts to question (and ultimately to invalidate) its own self-congratulatory access. Kapanadze’s Paris paintings are elliptical and fluid and are far more opaque, than they first appear. Their beguiling aloofness, their charming surface-innocence and measured anarchisms enter into my visual consciousness and my mental eye is startled and blinded by the pictorial continuities and discontinuities --- the knowing, visual malapropisms that Kapanadze orchestrates with such grace. I do not know what to do with such recursively solipsistic filigree – like meanderings. I come to the point where I assert to myself that in thinking I can penetrate these complex/compound works that play off sincerity with irony, they remain all the more elusive for my misguided efforts. I cannot unravel their bundles of inconsistencies. Nor, in the end do I feel a need to do so. Instead I prize such works as elevated, euphoric experiences into the not-known.  Keti Kapanadze’s Paris paintings are captivating auguries. What they hold in reserve for me is precisely this anticipatory experience of revelation whose unveilings will become known to me in the future, perhaps, only at the moment I will have sufficiently prepared myself to receive their prophecies. In the meantime I dwell in the essential poetic dominion Keti Kapanadze’s brilliantly elusive Paris paintings. Their spatial topologies, toggling as they do between visibility and invisibility, propel us forward into lambent realms beyond fixed meaning, representation and intelligibility.

In the early 1990s, Keti Kapanadze, who still lived in her native town of Tbilisi at the time, developed a number of photographic series that are as of yet little known in an international context. These series have a very distinctive signature style and follow an artistic concept that oscillates between self-reflection and a critical analysis of contemporary life. The series My sister named..., Kazan Story, Words and Cups are all the more significant when seen in light of the historical, political and cultural context of the time. In the Soviet Union, the doctrine of Socialist Realism, as formulated at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, was rigorously applied to all of the arts for over four decades. Contemporary Soviet artists saw themselves confronted with an idealized visual ideology that was constantly reproduced and popularized, and which, by employing classical ideals of beauty, constructed an image of a positive present and a bright future. Against this backdrop of a canon of the “good”, an unofficial art scene emerged from the 1960s onwards. This scene was organized covertly and carried out substantive artistic experiments – especially in the medium of painting. In keeping with the unitary policies of the Soviet single-party state, Moscow was the center of cultural life and Georgia and the other Soviet republic were simply marginal satellites. As Gia Edzgveradze describes in this publication, the independent Georgian artist were not merely faced with the division of culture into official and unofficial spheres, as was prevalent in Moscow. Rather, the region’s national cultural legacy was degraded to being mere ‘folklore’ and functionalized under the perspective of Soviet patriotism, rendering it useless as a reference point in the local artists’ investigations of their own artistic identity. During the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse following the signing of the Alma Ata protocols in 1991, Keti Kapanadze found a fitting Launchpad for her work in the medium of photography. In the Soviet Union, photography had a certain special status in comparison to the other media, including painting, sculpture and film. During the Stalin era, exceptional photographs from the 1920s, such as those by Alexander Rodchenko, were rejected for being “formalist” – they were only rehabilitated in the ‘years of the thaw’, during Nikita Khrushchev’s regime. During this time, the medium of photography also became the most important instrument of self-dramatization for the head of state and party leader, superseding portrait painting, which had been omnipotent under Stalin. In the 1960s, photography stood for immediacy, spontaneity and the “Modern”, and Khrushchev made more extensive use of the medium’s new-found currency than any other Soviet politician, opting for countless photographic portraits. Despite the rehabilitation of the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s, photography as a medium officially remained trapped in a functionalist context. It was a performance aid to the ideological mission and operated outside of the “arts” context. Yet the changes occurring in photojournalism in the 1960s brought about an increased interest in photography, and the first photographers’ “amateur clubs” were formed. These acted as nuclei for an independent photographic art that became established in the former Soviet Union later on, namely in the early 1990s. It was only then that contemporary photography was also collected by Russian museums.

Seen against this backdrop, the photographic medium may have appeared particularly exciting to Keti Kapanadze in the 1990s, as thanks to its marginal position in arts it was less steeped in the Socialist image politics than, for example was painting. She did not, however, use the medium directly, but instead used it as an aid to develop conceptual series of images. In her three-part photographic series entitled My sister named... Keti Kapanadze uses black and white photography for its stringent classical form. The photographs in the series show a female face. In some, the face is seen as a whole, sometimes we just see fragments. The focus of the composition is always on the protagonist’s forehead, painted with changing scenes: an open window with a starry night sky above a city, a plane crash and finally the allegorical depiction of death in the shape of a Grim Reaper. The woman looks into the camera with a calm, wakeful and concentrated gaze. The composition and the woman’s face are reminiscent of Rodchenko’s illustration of the poem Pro Eto (That’s What) of 1923, featuring the face of poet Lilya Brik. This allusion places Faces in a very particular aesthetic and photo-historical context. But by showing only parts of the face and through the gesture of painting the forehead, Kapanadze adds a somewhat surreal or seemingly magical aspect, so that the image vacillates between distance and closeness, and between openness and concealment. Whether the drawings on the woman’s forehead stand for her ‘muddled thoughts’ or the individual’s memories, or whether the Grim Reaper is a reference, after Antonin Artaud, to the fact that death is inherent in every human face, remains uncertain. What is certain, however, is that Kapanadze is referencing the power and freedom of thoughts, as these reside behind the forehead, and scrutinizing (post-) Soviet realities. At the same time, Faces thwarts the ossified function of photography as a medium of historical reproduction, freeing it of its ideological superstructure and putting it into motion – which can be read as an analogy to the political, economic and social instability of that era.

The Kazan Story series, consisting of several parts and made during the same period, was developed by the artist during a trip to Kazan, a city on the banks of the Volga River. It is the capital of the Tatarstan Republic in Russia and has a checkered history. Not only was it the first non-Russian city to become part of the Russian empire under Ivan the Terrible, thereby laying the cornerstones for the Russian multiethnic state, it also has one of the country’s oldest universities. (Alexander Rodchenko studied painting here.) Kazan is the center of Islam in Russia, and to this day an important location for business and culture. Keti Kapanadze’s black and white photo series brings together wintery street scenes in the style of Street Photography and subjective and fragmentary shots of an interior featuring a young man. Despite the binary opposition of inside and outside, both the street scenes and the interior scenes are permeated by a sense of misery so typical of the Soviet era. Photographs of people in uniform winter clothes in the snow slush on anonymous, austere streets are juxtaposed with images of the male protagonist, who is also only partially visible and who remains anonymous as his face is never explicitly shown. He lights a cigarette, slumps while sitting on his bed, or sits at a table with his forehead resting on the tabletop. Time seems to have congealed in this narrative series where nothing really happens. Kapanadze undermines this atmosphere with a further image. This shows a young woman shot from below, wearing a dark suit and top hat and balancing on the railings of a high rise building. The heavily built-up city stretches all the way to the horizon, its contours seemingly dissolving in the distance. The entire composition is centered on dynamism: the protagonist can be seen walking on the railings, stretching her arm out to keep her balance, with her hair billowing in the wind. Her figure, rising into the sky, is paralleled by a Socialist tower building, so the horizon is intersected twice. The image, which Kapanadze has titled Kazan – Fata Morgana, seems like a counter program – but not just to the other motifs in the series, it also seems like an alternative to the sugarcoated, Socialist photography, as a metaphorical alternative to the conformist existence in Socialism. The composition’s dynamism stands for deviation and nonconformism. However, the title suggests that this attitude towards the world exists merely in wishful thinking, that it is a Fata Morgana, eagerly longed for in the desert-like present.

Keti Kapanadze’s work with photography retained its critical connection to the image politics it is embedded in even as she moved to Germany. Her collages reflecting clichéd and manipulated ideals of beauty as advanced by glossy magazines are but one example of this. She has always worked in this way because she is aware of the fact that we can only understand ourselves in relation to social realities, as Horkheimer and Adorno would have it, and that it is both a duty and an opportunity for photographic art to effectively counter the functionalization of images as instruments used to manipulate our (self-) perception and public opinion.