The first impression that Levan Lagidze's work conveys is one of internal drama always accompanied by a feeling of calm. Every one of his paintings exudes this mood – the result of his point of view, to cast away the hostile interaction between a human being and the surrounding reality; not to express the conflict between the world and Man but instead to bring a feeling of nostalgia for their harmonic unison. Levan Lagidze is painting the world he desires. He searches for and finds important icons in the reality of his surroundings and slowly, with the help of generalization and analysis, creates a complete model of the world in his paintings which are distinguished by their own dimension of time and space. The same pattern repeated time and time again establishes the painter's ideological and artistic position and enables him to find the best pictorial and compositional version. |
Thinking about and realizing your work leads you to the belief that you have your own path which stretches outwards from your individuality, that you learn from your predecessors, and that, in addition, you have to search for and find your own teacher among them. In general, life is all about exploration and discovery. One always finds new things in the work of a same painter. There is an eternal and great school of art stretching from the frescoes of David Gareji and Giotto all the way to the Avant-garde movement. ...As for professionalism, it is the result of a lot of work, and in general it is built up during one’s lifetime. This is a dynamic profession. ...I would come up with this conclusion: professionalism is the ability to skilfully express what a person makes of the outside world or of their individual role. Such people presumably have greater potential for emotion. |
I am an optimist when it comes to dealing with eternal values, but when these values are not established I become sad. One could say that I am a “sad optimist” – so basically a gloomy optimist. |
Lagidze doesn’t show an orgy of colours, but instead he shows their “last supper”... ... He is an eloquent painter – pulling invisible threads between the soul and matter. These threads are not woven into a beautiful Gobelins tapestry but instead create a painting in which the movement of constructed forms is expressed through a synthesis of eyesight and the contemplation of the mind. A feeling of life being born lurks in the birth of these forms. |
His world, his art, is a great galaxy. Perceiving his paintings depends upon distance: from afar, one sees a large canvas, but as one moves ever closer one's approach seems endless and one discovers ever more numerous and increasingly minute universes within. |
It is said that painting is the art of showing colour – but to me, however, it is the art of hiding colour. Colour needs to be hidden in order to provoke the viewer into searching for what one has hidden in the painting. |
