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Maya Chijavadze The work of Maya Chijavadze is based on a broad artistic background. She studied fine arts at the State Academy of Tbilisi, graduated in the faculty of Architecture and participated as an art director and costume designer in Georgian film productions. She lived in Tbilisi (1952-1988),Paris (1988-1989) and Amsterdam, her actual residence. This rich background manifests itself in a many-sided, fertile and highly personal art, which attracts attention both in Holland and abroad.General development In her carrier there can be discerned several stages, clearly separated, still interrelated with each other. In her Tbilisi period she was involved in the film production, making detailed costume designs and very beautiful, big size stagings of film shots on wooden panels. In Paris she came under the lasting spell of the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, resulting in hundreds of elegant, light, and dreamy illustrations of her work. The link between the visual arts and poetry has been from then on always near at hand, and comes strongly to the fore again in her most recent work, inspired on the bible. Once in Amsterdam she developed into a confident, full grown painter, covering a wide range of subjects, from city views, portraits and even horse paintings to her favourite form of expression, the world of imagination, or better said, the imaginative transformation of basic human emotions to a general, symbolic level. She often combined painting with the making of installations and maquettes, in which her architectural and cinematographic background helped her once again. These installations and maquettes were in their turn often the object of her paintings. This last procedure was the seed of a new way of working to which Maya turned in 2005. From that year on Maya is making almost exclusively digital art. The change however, is less abrupt as it first seems to be. Her work still retains a painterly quality, combined with architectural and theatrical elements, but enriched by the possibilities offered by the new medium. Her actual working procedure is as follows: she makes photographs of her own installations and maquettes, sometimes combining them with ready-mades, scans the pictures and prints them on canvas. Even though this working procedure is of recent date, she has mastered the new medium completely, resulting in impressive series of works.Form and meaning Maya Chijavadze is an artist with a message. Even though often playful and humorous, her work is seldom casual and never superficial. Her involvement is of a strong spiritual and emotional nature. In work as well as in life she deals with the basic themes of the human condition, themes which concern all of us. They can be summarized as permutation and the dynamic balance of contrasts. Nobody can deny these very true facts of human life and it is to Maya Chijavadze to give a strong, compact translation of it in visual language, making it understandable, giving consolation and joy, but which is sometimes shocking as well, confronting us with the meaning of what we are doing with our life. These themes were obviously already present in a series of paintings of stone dolls, made in the period preceding the crucial year 2005. Both the elements of permutation and contrast are effectively suggested by the surrealistic nature of the dolls, so human in behaviour, but not in physics, made of stone, but painted as though they had the softness of human flesh. In her recent digital work Maya Chijavadze continues developing her favourite themes. Repeatedly she uses forms opposed to each other, like regular, stable forms as a fan and a cylinder to counterbalance forms of a more irregular, capricious nature. Just on the base of these form contrasts she can make complete stories in a playful way, with nothing but two pieces of crumpled paper. They resemble one of the shots of an animation film, leaving it to the imagination of the spectator to give his or her own interpretation to it. Apart from the inherent nature of forms, there are also certain objects which effectively express the themes of permutation and dynamic balance of contrasts. Because of their returning time and again, they contribute to what we can call a personal signature. For example the contrasts of sex, violence and love, power and fragility, bondage and freedom, reality and illusion, are concisely expressed by means of objects like scissors, glasses, money, candies, clocks, mirrors. These objects are made to speak, so to say, by the skilful manipulation of sharp or diffuse light, of perspective and a very effective use of colour to highlight the dramatic moments of her ‘stories’. Not to miss the point, Maya sometimes provides the representations with short texts, the words being integral part of the total composition. As we have seen, the union of word and picture, form and meaning, is from the start a very important one in her oeuvre.Works based on the bible Recently, Maya Chijavadze is concentrating herself on series of themes based on the bible. They hark back to the old, time-honoured tradition of devotion pictures, which Maya revives, successfully adapting them to the modern times and circumstances. The uniformity of size, the modest format and the shimmering deep colours already invite to introspection and contemplation. Once again, words, in these case fragments of the bible, are integral part of the picture. There is a new sense of peace and tranquillity noticeable in this series. The meditative mood is enhanced by the transparent layers, covering the canvas, which deprive the objects of their corporality. They evoke a world beyond in which the bewildering contrasts of human live, the recurrent theme in the work of Maya Chijavadze, seem to be dissolved at last.Ernest Kurpershoek, art historian |
