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| Henrijs Preiss’ utopian stage sets Vilnis Vējš, Art Critic Henrijs Preiss. ARTEFACTS 21.02.–28.03.2013. Latvian National Museum of Art exhibition hall Arsenāls creative workshop | |
| Even though I’ve known Henrijs Preiss (born 1973) for fifteen years now, I’m not sure that I can reveal anything essential about his personality and art that would suit a hagiographic style of essay. Yes, we studied at the same educational institution and in the same field (specializing in stage design at the Art Academy of Latvia Painting Department under Professor Andris Freibergs) but just a few years apart, though neither of us was particularly sociable. Later on, it may have been 2004, I visited Henrijs (probably like many Latvians who, when abroad, suddenly “remember” their old colleagues) when he was already living in London. I had a look at his works, made use of the opportunity to see a performance at the New Vic Theatre where Camilla, his wife at that time, was appearing and, it seems, we all spent a pleasant evening together. I even proposed organizing a small exhibition back in our homeland (and this indeed took place in 2005, at the recently opened and stylish gallery Istaba). | |
 Henrijs Preiss. 2011 Publicity photos Courtesy of the artist | |
| Recently, we met again – prior to Henrijs’ Artefacts solo exhibition at the Latvian National Museum of Art Arsenāls exhibition hall creative workshop. Although we hadn’t seen each other for many years, instead of shaking hands we hugged (at Henrijs’ initiative!) and chatted about art, but didn’t exactly pour out our hearts to each other. To me Henrijs has always seemed to be a responsive and intelligent person, but also quite introverted. It’s not easy to describe his art either – for a basic reason. His geometrically abstract compositions defy translation of their “content” into words. The artist doesn’t give titles to his works, but rather ordinal numbers (now numbering way over three hundred). “Encryption” would even be in conflict with the author’s concept which he expressed in an interview for the Autumn 2010 edition of Elephant magazine (p. 78): “(…) characters, geometry and structure in art, especially in religious art, are the same throughout the world. Only stories make them different.” Preiss says something similar to Juste Kostikovaite in the Arterritory.com portal: “It is crucial to understand, and it always fascinates me, that people always perceive my paintings to be their own cultural heritage.” When I ask a question to clarify what happens if, during the process of work, a composition of geometric elements starts to resemble something quite specific, in other words it begins to look like representation, Henrijs responds that this gets corrected. Even though a number of critics have tried to find a concrete message in his works, these attempts, in my opinion, don’t turn out well, as the range of meanings inherent in the geometric symbols is too broad and even contradictory in order for such interpretations to be believed. This, however, doesn’t mean that Henrijs Preiss’ form creation is chaotic or haphazard, quite the opposite, and proof of this is the autonomy of his signature style and its stability, as well as its evolution, where it is possible to distinguish both an unchanging foundation and certain laws of development, and progress. This all requires deeper analysis, and being confident that this will happen at some time, I hazard to offer some partly professional, partly personal remarks which nobody else really could. If anyone wants to see the artist’s full CV or all possible interpretations of his works, I can recommend to – borrowing a suggestion from Quentin Tarantino – Google it, and you’ll get an idea. Motor car, desert A story which I can share is so insignificant, that you’ll never find it in any other article about Henrijs Preiss. It has absolutely no connection with his art. But it does give a bit of a picture of a time when he made some significant choices in his life. It could have been the late 1990s, when I packed it in as stage designer because the work was too irregular and badly paid, in addition, overwhelming successes weren’t forthcoming. Henrijs, by contrast, had just tried his hand at theatre and what’s more, with far greater success. Overall, the situation wasn’t encouraging for the creation of brilliant stage design works. I began to work in an advertising agency, not just for the pay, but also because of the resources available for realizing my ideas. Quite by chance, for the first advertising clip that I’d come up with the casting agency chose for the main role... Henrijs Preiss. He was a handsome, fair-haired youth with elegant glasses, and in the video had to do nothing more than to drive an extremely expensive car. Please note – nobody was at all puzzled by the combination of the hero’s young age and the luxury car, as this was exactly how some Swedish bank saw their ideal consumer, a successful professional. Along the roadsides there were signs inviting to take out loans, buy properties, make deposits and so on. As we now know, Henrijs Preiss chose a much riskier path in life – to continue with his Master’s studies in London, at St. Martin’s College. A reminder should be given here that Latvia had not yet been admitted to the European Union and this was an isolated instance. I don’t know what kinds of difficulties he may have encountered there, Henrijs himself has mentioned only the different teaching style, or more accurately – the absence of any sort of teaching. Later on, though, you could begin to think that the image of a successful professional really did suit Henrijs – his career looked smooth and perhaps even seemed to have been successfully calculated. Although he’d tried his hand at stage design for a number of dance performances at London’s Hoxton Hall, he saw a greater future in painting (in Latvia he’d already exhibited works at the Bastejs gallery). Collaboration with the Sesame Gallery (later – the James Freeman Gallery) followed, and participation in the East End Academy: The Painting Edition (2009) group exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, after which the Saatchi Gallery invited him to take part in an extensive show, Newspeak: British Art Now (2010). Some of his works also ended up in its collection. However, while following Henrijs’ progress only from publicly available sources, I noticed that there followed a long pause. Information was not being updated, neither in the artist’s nor the gallery’s home page. Later it transpired that Henrijs Preiss was once again driving around in a car – this time for a full eleven months, travelling around the deserts of North America. I don’t know whether this was just a holiday trip, the realization of a long held dream which his fully sold out exhibition in Seoul had provided, or a journey with possibly a spiritual motivation. “I had intense feelings, coming eye to eye with the question of survival each evening,” he revealed in Arterritory.com. In conversation with me, too, Henrijs said of his experience: “when there’s nothing around you, but everything is there”. His exhibition in Latvia was the first after his creative holiday. It’s still hard to say whether any significant changes in his creative work will follow, but that wouldn’t be a surprise. For example, Henrijs has expressed a wish to “get rid of symmetry”, to try to transfer his graphics into a graphics format and to seek new collaboration partners. He also doesn’t rule out the possibility of returning to stage design one day. And theatre I found a rare publication on my bookshelf which, as it turns out, I’d put together myself. It’s a small booklet called Stage Design in Latvia, published in 1995, when Latvia’s stage designers were once again getting ready to take part in the Prague Quadrennial. The booklet has a fold out appendix in which you can see the works of scenography students. Among them are, for example, Monika Pormale, Anna Heinrihsone and others. Henrijs Preiss, who was studying in 3rd year at the time, is represented by a maquette entitled Satyricon. It’s a smallish photograph, but you can make out that the modelled stage has a very sharply sloping floor, with a semi-circular dip in the foreground containing a spherical construction. Viewed from the front, it creates a perfect circle. On the sides, the stage is bordered by two walls with elements of classical order, and in the middle section, a tower has been built. The floor has a greenish patination and, it seems, is also textured. In other words, at that time Preiss was already using the elements of form by which his work can still be recognized today. Maybe that’s why I’ve always perceived his paintings in two ways – not just as planes perpendicular to the view, but also as vertically placed draft sketches of plans for utopian stages. | |
 Henrijs Preiss. No 341. Acrylic on wood. 107x110 cm. 2012 Photo: Normunds Brasliņš Publicity photos Courtesy of the artist | |
| Of the works that Henrijs has done for the theatre, the performance of The Brothers Karamazov has remained in my memory. It became legendary as the diploma final work from a course with some talented actors (Kaspars Znotiņš, Andris Keišs, Baiba Broka and others), lasted for five hours and took place in the rehearsal space of the Academy of Culture. The setting was made up purely of the hundred-year-old wooden walls of the building, painted a dark red. Only the real, dilapidated old wooden door, floors and windows were used. To be precise, not much more than the layout of the actual space, textures and one intense colour was at the disposal of the stage designer. In a telephone call, Pēteris Krilovs, well-known and highly respected Latvian theatre director, willingly recalled the collaboration with the budding artist of the time: at a show of student works he’d noticed Preiss’s drawings on the theme of Gogol’s Petersburg Tales, had a conversation with the artist and understood that collaboration was possible. To my remark that Henrijs Preiss wasn’t very talkative in his youth, Krilovs replied that he’d used his pedagogic skills to get by. In tandem from 2002 to 2007, the fledgling stage designer had a respectable number of assignments: besides those mentioned, Werther at the New Riga Theatre and Divkauja (‘Duel’) at the Daugavpils Theatre and the New Rīga Theatre, Mother Joan of the Angels at the National Theatre and Me, Feierbah at the Liepāja Theatre. Krilovs remembers that in one performance a motif similar to the one in the Satyricon model was used – a pit in the foreground of the stage floor, with the action taking place at a number of levels. In his current painting, too, Henrijs Preiss emphasizes layering, in which one ornament/drawing overlaps another. I suppose that this is how the influence of the theatre’s traditional slide and backcloth system may express itself, although Henrijs has never directly played on this. He does agree that his painting style has been influenced by the dimension of time, a characteristic of theatre performances, in which the motif develops like a frame plan – one group of elements is preserved, but others are changed. In a static work, on the other hand, they all appear at the same time. This is applicable to the layering of images noted by Krilovs, and equally to my version about the composition as a spatial plan. Henrijs Preiss’s paintings have been compared to architecture previously. On the Freeman home page, they were compared with Rome’s Pantheon and the structures of buildings designed by Brunelleschi, but artist Adrian Burnham in his text about Henrijs mentions similarities with early church design, “the plan view of a basilica” (Henrijspreiss.com). It’s true, in some of Henrijs’ earlier paintings a rectangle filled with parallel lines appears, reminding one very much of a wooden plank floor (No 81, No 108, No 184). Later this does transform into more complex, radial and pronounced curved line rhythms as well. The paintings are composed according to the principles of central symmetry, however, the vertical axial symmetry can be discerned more readily. Along the sides of many works one can see extended rectangular fields, which restrict the horizontal movement of the view, just like walls (for example, No 341). Meanwhile, the symmetry in the upper and lower part is much freer: the lower part is more directive, steering the viewer’s perception, and the upper – recapitulative, just like a place of worship or the structure of a stage plan. Yet, unlike architectural plans, in the middle of the bottom part of Henrijs Preiss’ work there isn’t an opening or “door”, but rather a closed form, which could be associated more with a stage ramp, an extension in the proscenium or a conductor’s dais. On the other hand, if the painting’s upper part is read as “depth”, it has room for generalisation within it, which in a sacred place is formed by the altar, but in theatre – illusion, or wonder. In it there is often a sun motif or some other closed form. In relation to Henrijs Preiss, mention is often made of orthodox icons and the influence of the early 20th century Russian avant-garde, Masonic symbols, mandalas, Indian and Latvian patterns and countless other versions. Each of these has their pluses and minuses: for example, as we saw, at the beginning of his activities, Russian literature really was interpreted. The similarities with Constructivist or, let’s be more precise, Suprematist works can in contrast be seen with a more deliberately biased eye, assuming that the unifying element is the division of the painting’s field into abstract geometrical figures. Curator Irene Bradbury had a justified reason to include the works of Preiss in the Inner Klang (Rod Burton Gallery, 2009) group exhibition, choosing Kazimir Malevich’s historical concept as the slogan, however the modelling of a three dimensional object on a plane which was characteristic of Gustavs Klucis, for example, is quite a distant analogy. Without doubt, references to Russian art are a convenient label for dealers and a life buoy for critics in explaining the works of any artist who has come from the territory of the former USSR. The link with Masonic symbols, in turn, manifests itself most directly in the use of the fifth of the seven arts or geometry and the practical application of the instruments (compass, protractor and the 47th problem of Euclid), as required in a craftsman’s work. At the centre of a number of works by Preiss there is contact between two circular lines (this could, of course, be interpreted as a variation on the spheres of heaven and earth), and the oft used aureole of radial lines could be interpreted as a blazing star, or divine radiance. Nevertheless I, perhaps in my own interests, remain of the view that his art manifests a specific theatricality – not only with its striking appearance, but also in its construction. Therefore, to the various eras with which the specific “antiqueness” in the style of Henrijs Preiss is often associated, I would add Baroque as well. Its spirit expresses itself in the optical symmetry of the compositions, which is far from the sum of a simple mirror image and so suited to the era between the harmony of the Renaissance and the stiff formality of Classicism. The “weapons” of the Baroque are a sudden fascinating effect, the illusion of dynamism and, finally, the direct impact on a viewer’s emotions, no matter how calculatedly sophisticated are the ways and means by which this is achieved. Translation into English: Uldis Brūns | |
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