|
|
| A Close-up Portrait of a Spruce Stella Pelše, Art Historian Collection of the Latvian Contemporary Art Museum: Miervaldis Polis. In the summer rain. 1978 | |
| An early tempera painting by Miervaldis Polis In the summer rain (1978) seems to mark a facet of poetic, unpretentious hyperrealism present in his art. Polis’ manifold activities have already placed him among the most fascinating groundbreakers of Latvian art: through activities such as the provocative manipulations with cultural allusions during 1970s-80s and painting himself as part of Old Masters pictures, as well as performances of a political colouring: the Bronze Man actions which challenged the boundary-marks of Soviet public space. This work, however, for a less informed viewer might seem more difficult to attribute, although in Polis’ art it is not the only one(1). As the art historian Eduards Kļaviņš writes, Latvian art of the Soviet era displays a certain current of socialist post¬modernism – a postmodernist reaction to an abstracted, free formalistic trend; the representatives of this kind of reaction were, first and foremost, the so-called French Group (Bruno Vasiļevskis, Imants Lancmanis, Maija Tabaka, Miervaldis Polis, Līg a Purmale), who were characterised by a “paradoxical return to the mimetic image, at the same time relinquishing official themes, a primary tendency to create a plastically distinct shape and an interest in the classics, an avoidance of expressive exaggeration, a certain kind of rationalism dictated not by political pragmatism, but something independently conceptual and intimately subjective (..)”(2) | |
 Miervaldis Polis. In the summer rain. Tempera on canvas. 41x38,5cm. 1978 | |
| The work under consideration is neither a lonely peak nor an unusual sideways step in Latvian art, rather it forms part of a series of works linked by theme and style, among which we should note first of all Bruno Vasiļevskis’ close-ups of trees (Linden, 1974; Foliage, 1975; Foliage and skies, 1977; A view through the window, 1987–1988, etc.) and Līga Purmale’s “green” works (Foliage, 1976; The end of the world, 1983, etc.); the nuances of mist and lighting playing on the crowns of trees seemed to attract Purmale quite some time later also (Play of morning light, 2001; Morning, 2002 etc.). Polis’ painting stands out in this group by a very accurate, methodically focused transference of visual reality. With the light cautiously breaking through the spruce branches, a palette of moss green shades dominates against the background of cooler tints. The basic principle of the perspective of air has been observed, at the same time the ruling concepts are revised about an expressively diverse surface, rich in colour scheme and texture that had become a kind of criterion of quality in the 1970s. So the cautiously critical statements about “mechan¬ically assembled images” whose “[..] restricted cool greenish overall tone [..], being simplified, cannot emotionally engage a sensitive viewer, but can only reconcile them with the monotony of nature elements depicted in detail”(3) do not come as a surprise. The specific character of tempera allows for the production of a thin layer of painting, free from the ‘sculpturesque’ accidents deriving from the texture of oils, in which a host of monotonously identical spruce twigs, birch leaves, finespun lines of rain and blades of grass really do stand out. Each element in its self-sufficiency is equal to the others, making one reflect upon the apparently compulsory maxim of accentuating that which is “most essential” – yet who is ever going to decide what is and what should be the most essential? The ‘portraits’ of trees within the context of Polis’ art is, however, an episode of secondary importance, as he is not really that interested in the image of pristine wilderness which, in earlier periods of Latvian art, once dominated. What prevails are the paradoxes of culture and civil¬isation, the combinations and transformations of those elements which allow us – already at quite a different level – to study the capacity of illusion and hyperrealism techniques to pose visual riddles which cannot be solved by a viewer in the passive position of observer.(4) (1) A portrait of a tree with an identical composition entitled Egle (‘Spruce’) and dated 1979, in which instead of rain one may perceive sunlight, is reproduced in Tatjana Kačalova’s book Ainava: Dabas attēlojums latviešu padomju glezniecībā (‘Landscape: Depiction of Nature in Latvian Soviet Painting’). (2) Kļaviņš, E. Socreālisma mutācijas: Socmodernisms un socpostmodernisms Latvijā (‘Mutations of Social Realism’) From: Padomjzemes mitoloģija: Muzeja raksti 1. Sast. E. Ansone. Rīga: Latvijas Nacionālais mākslas muzejs, 2009, p. 111 (3) Kačalova, T. Ainava: Dabas attēlojums latviešu padomju glezniecībā. Rīga: Liesma, 1985, p. 141 (4) See: Bryzgel, A. Truth and Trompe L’oeil: Miervaldis Polis’ Paintings in the Context of Late Soviet Latvia. In: Mākslas Vēsture un Teorija, 2008, No. 11, pp 34–45. /Translator into English: Sarmīte Lietuviete/ | |
| go back | |
