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| Black patent leather shoes in the yellow rain Anita Vanaga, Art Historian “It’s raining! It’s raining! It’s raining! Buy pictures. Buy pictures!” Voldemārs Irbe. Ilmārs Blumbergs’ solo exhibition 11.12.2010.–30.01.2011. LNMM izstāžu zāles “Arsenāls” Radošā darbnīca / Arsenāls exhibition hall creative workshop, Latvian National Art Museum | |
| “Write about the giant’s shoelace!” was Lejasmeijere’s advice upon hearing me complain about the limited space allocated for my review. So – a giant. Voldemārs Irbe (1893–1944). He painted smallish pastels which were sold for “dirty little coins”. Flowers, markets or churches all revealed a sacred aspect, humility before creation and the Creator. Blumbergs remembers the first Irbe pastel he saw, in 1947, in the workshop of his cobbler grandfather Kārlis Fokrots, on the corner of Kirova and Jumāra streets. Here he spent some four or five nights with his mother, hiding from deportation. The second – the shoes. Blumbergs begins his Irbe exhibition with black patent leather shoes, a public status symbol and a counterweight to Irbe’s bare feet. Going barefoot as a denial of the physical body is an ascetic act intended to prevent distraction from the main focus – to depict what cannot be depicted, to express the inexpressible and “to paint the sea”, as Blumbergs puts it. In order to grasp the size of infinity, something comprehensible to the human mind is required – another person, art, a butterfly or a fly that turns into an aircraft. Not according to Escher’s principle of visual interaction, but rather acoustically, like the name of an Old Riga street that was transformed from the German Hering, meaning herring, into the Latvian Kungu, meaning gentlemen. | |
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| The third – the string that weaves its way through the work. The edged slant of the yellow rain is present even when it is not visible. The rain becomes a wave, the wave becomes a cloud, and the cloud becomes a droplet that touches the last breath. Life fades. The exhibition also includes another motif: a pit. The first time that Blumbergs used a pit in the proscenium was for Rainis’ mystery play ‘Joseph and his Brothers’ (Dailes teātris, 1981), where it served as a layer of the hero’s psycho-structure which is always present and apparent. A directing stage designer does not tend to forget his or her discoveries from a previous “life”, they resurface again to illuminate a different facet of perception. In medieval times, a master craftman’s eyes were poked out to prevent him from creating another masterpiece. But all in good time. Blumbergs puts on a red hat, removes his shoes and socks and places them next to the black patent leather shoes right beneath the yellow rain. Ascending the steep stairs to the “summit of being”, the “pit” opens to view – where, with feverish movements, a person tries to shed their own skin and be reborn. The body has taken over the whole space. On the fourth wall, removed strips of skin are drying out like trophies. But on the monitor, life goes on – Irbe (Imants Tilbergs) scrambles out of the ashes, and dressed in Blumbergs’ brown tunic, with a folder under his arm and deformed toes, attempts to walk along a railway line. The balancing act fails. He talks to himself like Glenn Gould in his final recordings. For a brief moment only we catch a glimpse of Irbe’s skittish eyes, when the lonely run, accompanied by Jānis Petraškevičs’ breath music, is halted for an instant by a passing train. Irbe resumes, pauses and regains his balance. In the conclusion, a quote from Irbe: “Upon seeing the moving train at a crossing, I suddenly had the subconscious thought that I could put my head on the rails and I would not be hurt.” Irbe was killed on October 10, 1944, during a Russian air raid on Riga. Behind the next door there is a bright “operating theatre”, where passions, offal and dust surgically removed from the existential flow lie on the dissection table. These are sensuous drawings, shells from a Petlyakov-2 aircraft, a crucifix (Diāna Dimza-Dimme: “Faith is not where you lay down the cross”), some chocolate, a piece of pencil, a button... The “operation” takes place in the mind. “The cloud in Irbe’s pastel work is like a brain. It seems as if it’s the brains of all of us that are floating in the sky. Here, at the very edge, a plane falls into the water like Breughel’s Icarus. You sit by the sea, drawing and not feeling that a small hand presents you with an insect. The fly flies, the plane falls, and under the sea there is another sea. The brain has turned into eternity, but in that endless darkness there is another brain, like a worm that eats at you and you can’t get rid of it. You are always tormented by the brain. While drawing, you get the feeling that there is one world which you draw and another world that you draw yourself into and disappear. It’s like falling into the water. Splash!” Reality merges with the yellow rain. A sheet arises in front of the works embedded in reality to reveal another of Blumberg’s mythologems – Irbe’s imagined mountain and mystical wasp. The “operation” concludes with the undulations of the sea’s waves, “as gentle as the sand falling when burying a coffin”. “I don’t believe in the picture, but through it I show reverence for God,” Blumbergs quotes Irbe, and asks: “Is it Irbe? Is it not Irbe? Irbe is just a form through which to hide. To my mind, every artist hides. The more outstanding the form, the more they are playing hide-and-seek with themselves. And often they don’t even know what they have hidden.” Professor Eduards Kļaviņš summed up Blumbergs’ diagnosis in three words: formalism, mannerism and symbolism. While this does not sound as good as “liberty, equality and fraternity”, it indicates the amplitude of Blumbergs’ “corridor of life”, in which the idea of “pure art” is commensurate with biographical reference points. Blumbergs uses the parable to transfer panic, fear and hope onto another person and through his polyphonic staging unearths new imagery. Yet personal death is outside empirical experience. It is always in the future, and to understand this you must move on to a real event. In transubstantiation, a number of intentions chime with each other, overlap or maintain their autonomy. The simultaneous co-existence and multiple layers which are strongly expressed in the “cross sections” of the compositions and encompass the pit-purgatory motif, lend ambiguity to the temporal principle and demote Irbe’s twisted tale in relation to the overarching message. Past experiences flare up in the present, into an awareness that becomes a uniting factor for everything that there is. /Translator into English: Filips Birzulis/ | |
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