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| Perfect provocations and paradoxes Stella Pelše, Art Historian Artist Kristaps Ģelzis | |
| When artist Kristaps Ģelzis, the author of countless installations and objects, unexpectedly turned to watercolour painting in 2007, art historian Eduards Kļaviņš called this a “provocation in reverse”: “[..] without shocking effects, the usual flouting of local taboos, new materials, technological tricks and everything else which one could expect from a star of contemporary art, which Kristaps Ģelzis of course is, having had this reputation since the times of the ‘border transgressors’.”1 Continuing with the cosmic metaphors, one can say that the star shone at its brightest in 2011, when Ģelzis won the competition to represent Latvia at the Venice Biennale with the Mākslīgais miers [‘Artificial Peace’] series of paintings and shortly afterwards received the Purvītis Prize for his Varbūt [‘Maybe’] solo exhibition at the Māksla XO Gallery (2009). Both of these commendations can be linked with a sort of rehabilitation of painting – art on a place surface, that reflects, both ironically and a little frighteningly, on the reality of the surrounding world, and which in the series of paintings destined for Venice is reduced almost to the abstract. To ask the viewers to fill the pictorial space with their imaginations at different times of day and night could also be regarded a provocation, if topical and easy-to-read messages are held to be the prevailing mainstream. In any case, stars don’t suddenly appear out of nowhere, neither in the universe nor in art. In both instances a certain process of accumulation and evolution is important. | |
 Kristaps Ģelzis. 2008. Photo from the private archive of Kristaps Ģelzis | |
| “I know what I didn’t want to become – an architect. I really didn’t have a lot of time to think about what I wanted to be. I was imposed all kinds of duties – music school, drawing, and I had to study a lot in a school that specialized in English. There really wasn’t any time to fantasize.”2 But Ģelzis did want to distance himself from a family atmosphere dominated by architecture.3 Why the Art Academy of Latvia? “I was sick and tired of playing the violin. To announce to my parents that I wasn’t going to finish music school after eight years of studies I offered, as an alternative, to attend preparatory courses and make an attempt to enrol in the Art Academy.”4 In 1986, while still a fifth year student at the Academy, Ģelzis joined the so-called supergraphic artists group, creating expressive large-scale silkscreen prints with deformed figural motifs, suffused with impetuosity and dramatic effect. “The creative efforts of Breže, Putrāms, Ģelžis and Pētersons at that time followed a common aesthetic programme, which took shape simultaneously with the development of neo-expressionism around the world, for example, the creative work of Germany’s Neue Wilde group.”5 In Ģelzis’ silkscreens there was no shortage of rather tense expressive scenes with the figures of people and animals (Pāri I–II, [‘Above I–II’] 1987; Kritiens, [‘Fall’] 1988) and even the brutal motif of violence (Agresija, [‘Aggression’] 1987). This last work is distinctive for the ornamented grid motif, which henceforth was to be important, as well as the transformation of two-dimensional graphic art into action: during the 1987 Art Days Ģelzis burnt the work, in this way directing real aggression against the portrayal of violence. The video installation Dismantling the Wall (1988) at the Riga – Lettische Avantgarde group exhibition in West Germany, in turn, continued the Mūris [‘Wall’] happening which had already commenced previously in 1986, during the Cinema Days. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 gives this theme of fragmentation of the whole an ideologically symbolic currency. In Ģelzis’ work of the late 1980s and early 1990s, ornamental structures similar in style to those of graffiti artist Keith Haring become apparent – not just as variations on the wall theme, but also in the post-modern palimpsest-like coloured silkscreens Rieta Madonna [‘Sunset Madonna’] (1988), Portrets 2000 (1990) and Olimpija X (1991). Organically spatial thinking Ģelzis also showed potential for graphics in the innovative cover design collages for Avots magazine (1990). However, in the 1990s, when in Latvian art there was a flourishing of metaphorically poetic large-scale installations and other breakouts from the confines of easel art, Ģelzis too turned to experiments in the three dimensions. Their international parallels could be sought in the broad transformation field of pop art, minimalism and conceptualism. “The process whereby the graphic works inadvertently grew into spatial expressions took place of its own accord, without any particular influences from the outside. [..] Ever since childhood I had helped my father and brother make models, working with various materials. Spatial thinking had developed organically, by empirically absorbing everything that was happening around me.”6 Around the beginning of the 1990s, Ģelzis was creating objects and installations from wire netting – laconic, geometric forms in nuanced proportions, as well as segregated segments of space, its “curves and paradoxes being in reality the result of the artist’s reflections on the paradoxes of our perception when confronted with a focused impact”7. In the field of minimalism and abstract sculpture, for example, one can discern in the oeuvre of Robert Morris or Anthony Caro certain parallels with those of Ģelzis’ works like Trīs grācijas [‘Three Graces’] (1990), Jāņa sēta [‘Jānis Yard’] (1992), Valodas stunda [‘Language Lesson’] (1992) and others. For the exhibition Latvia – 20th Century Somersault (1990) Ģelzis created the installation Veļas diena [‘Laundry Day’], with lead shirts hanging out to dry, plus video-projections and elements of procedural art. One of the semantic levels of the work, which is accentuated by its title, is connected with the idea of cleanliness as a new beginning, interpreting the exhibition theme – a political, social, artistic “somersault” or the radical re-evaluation of dominating views. If the figure projected upside down can be seen as an allusion to a local tragedy which occurred towards the end of the Soviet regime, the mysterious death of poet Klāvs Elsbergs, then the frozen fall together with the lead (heaviness), which must drip from the shirts as the clocks tick on, could even be perceived as a manifestation of socio-political activism. Associations elicited by the interaction of material and form are not regulated, however. In the Sapņu ceļojums [‘Dream Journey’] installation (exhibition Zoom Factor, 1994, International Jury Prize), minimal and reduced means of expression (car mirrors, air bags) and elements of language are used to balance between the pleasant anticipation of a journey and the scary aura of a possible accident. References to Latvian cultural heritage affirm the integration of contemporary methods into local experience. An example is Burtnieku pils [‘Burtnieku Castle’] (1988), the spiritual centre of Baltic ancestry constructed by 19th century national mythology, here built from bundles of waste paper, reminding us a little of the wooden structures and gigantic piles of reclaimed wood of Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata, or of Dullais Dauka [‘Crazy Dauka’] (1995) – the (impossible) pole vaulting equipment in open waters (installation in the city environment, Kotka, Finland), referring to a hero of Latvian literature who wanted to cross the sea. Captions, letters and titles, as well as their interplay and modifications, are important – in this way the Ņam Jums Paika [‘Yum, You’ve Got Grub’] (1998) installation juxtaposes evidence of modest Soviet era revelry with the wider public’s ignorance of international video-art star Nam June Paik; additional context is provided for the work by its exhibition in the 2nd Universal Latvian Art Exhibition. Materials, pop culture and images of self “A lot of velvet in dark and deep tones, some fur here and there and silver, stretchy synthetic fabric.”8 The Virtuale (1996) solo show at the State Museum of Art (now the Latvian National Museum of Art) introduced research into pliant, striking materials and the clash of the contradictory association between real / artificial (in English virtual – ‘being so in effect or in practice’, whereas ‘virtual reality’ describes something that is the complete opposite: a computer simulated environment). In this exhibition, the practice of a craftsman-like ‘finishing’ of art objects is especially evident – Ģelzis is not just a ‘finder’ of the readymade, who would merely place them in paradoxical combinations. | |
 Kristaps Ģelzis. The Day (Diena). Watercolour on paper. 2011 | |
| In the latter half of the 1990s there was an increase in the significance of the imagery of global pop culture, with the occasional introduction of kitschy playthings, the presence of which could involuntarily remind one of explorations in the realms of banality by pop art diversifiers Yoshitomo Nara or Jeff Koons. For example, the Stuffed Free Potato Eater (1997), incarnated in the form of a hunting trophy; Pasaules uzbūve [‘Construction of the World’] (1997), where Mickey Mice have assumed the role of Atlantis in supporting the globe, or in various film industry heroes and villains in Maskas [‘Masks’] (2001–2002). In digital print technique (Laika laukums [‘Time Square’] solo exhibition, 2000), the heroes of the X-Files television series, FBI investigators Mulder and Scully are matched respectively with a brand of cigarettes popular in the region and Latvia’s coat of arms, possibly leading one to reflect on Latvia’s (and the Baltic’s) “foreign” status in the Western world. Perhaps we even look like primates branded with a communist past (Red Chimpanzees, 2004, object in the city environment, The Hague, Netherlands)? The presence of national symbols in Ģelzis’ objects may initially seem playful and aesthetically innocent, but then through reflection on the theme of ‘us and them’ may suddenly lose optimism. For example, in the work Smorgasbord (1995, city environment, Stockholm, Sweden), the title relates to an offer to eat freely as much as you wish, but in reality the object can’t be reached, as it is much higher than the height of the chairs. Or also Uguns centrs [‘Centre of Fire’] (1997), where a tiny model of the White House attached to a red velvet background could be perceived as a certain kind of early warning that it could become a terrorist target. Alongside transformations of the most diverse readymades and materials, the image of a person, including self-image, is an equally important raw material in Ģelzis’ work. For example, the simultaneously burning and light-heartedly humming person (video Nekā personīga [‘Nothing Personal’], 2001) or the nude self-portrait in an office environment (digital print Personīgais kubs [‘Personal Cube’], 2001), whose forerunners American art historian Mark Allen Svede has noticed in Robert Morris’s work I-Box (1962), which is an “example of minimalist openly egocentric achievement”9, and also in Tony Smith’s “extremely laconic” work Die – admitting, though, that these parallels “at the moment the work was created were most likely outside Ģelzis’ aesthetic radar zone”10. Whereas the prolonged discomfort of a figure sitting in a contemplative thinking pose is revealed by an undistinguished and maybe even unnoticeable, at first, detail: the legs of the chair resting on the tops of the feet of the figures (Simts gadu [‘A Hundred Years’], 2005). | |
 Kristaps Ģelzis. The Morning (Rīts). Watercolour on paper. 2011 | |
| Two dimensional installations When, after a considerable period of time spent in the advertising business, Ģelzis exhibited the Ūdenskurs [‘Watercourse’] (2007) series of water colour paintings, they depicted ordinary motifs (close-ups of birds and flowers), as well as fighter planes above the city (Rīgas atslēgas [‘The Keys to Rīga’]) – this being a reference to geopolitical events (under the umbrella of NATO), as well as pop culture icons. Whilst retaining the virtuoso lightness of watercolour, the idyllic, salon-like overall tone typical of Latvian art has evanesced into a terrifying junction of optical illusion and unpredictable fluidity. At the Skaistums [‘Beauty’] exhibition held as part of the Cēsis Art Festival, Ģelzis demonstrated a new discovery in the Vakara pasaciņa [‘Bedtime Story’] (2008) cycle of works – luminescent acrylic colours and ultraviolet lighting, which transformed the paintings into a suggestively enticing, aesthetically opulent spatial installation, but, as if intruded on by mundane everyday, also showed police in reflective vests. In the Varbūt (2009) solo exhibition, however, the watercolour is once again permitted to become ordinary and even dirty, muddy (which is also a breach of the accepted boundaries of the technique), but a return to carefully streaked drawings (in the exhibition Artificial Peace, 2010), where various rather incompatible objects (for example, a cashpoint and a bed) emerge from the darkness, do offer quite a wide spectrum of reactions: “Ģelzis’ paradoxes can provoke brief mirth and long-lasting melancholy, thanks to the contradiction between the pedestrianism of the observations, the triviality of the subjects and the enormous significance which these should assign to representation in a work of art. The author delicately manipulates the expectations and feelings of the viewer, tricking them into the revelation that art isn’t able to observe, highlight or reveal anything of importance. This is in fact another paradox in the style of Ģelzis – that this trivial message surely hides a magnificent generalization within it! Paradox has, for this reason, always been a powerful weapon of thought, far exceeding the possibilities of simple ambiguity.”11 Visitors to the Venice Biennale also will most likely experience the feeling that nothing important is being shown or ‘handed on a plate’ to them, thereby activating the participation of each viewer’s imagination in the artistic event. /Translator into English: Uldis Brūns/ 1 Kļaviņš, Eduards. Jaunieguvumu uzrādīšana. Diena newspaper supplement Kultūras Diena, 1February, 2008. 2 kim? video interviews. Kristaps Ģelzis: Interview # 1 [Online]. Available at: www.youtube.com/user/kimriga#p/u/43/u8DfXpLQj8l 3 Kristaps Ģelzis’ father Modris Ģelzis was an architect, and his brother Andrejs Ģelzis chose the profession as well. 4 kim? video interviews. Kristaps Ģelzis: Interview # 1. 5 Austriņš, Raivis. Supergrafiķi. Rīga: Neputns, 2008, p. 7. 6 Lejasmeijere, Ieva. Pienāk mamma un iemet vēl… Saruna ar Kristapu Ģelzi. In the book: Deviņdesmitie: Laikmetīgā māksla Latvijā. [The Nineties: Contemporary Art in Latvia] Compiled and edited by Ieva Astahovska. Rīga: Contemporary Art Centre, 2010, p. 241. 7 Demakova, Helēna. Bilance brieduma svētkos. Diena, 20 November, 1992. 8 Iltnere, Anna. Kristaps Ģelzis. Rīga: Neputns, 2010, p. 33. 9 Svede, Mark Allen. KRIX jeb Vai jūs pazīstat cilvēku, kurš jums uzbruka? In: Kristaps Ģelzis. Darbu katalogs. Rīga: Rīga Gallery, 2005, p. 13. 10 Ibid. 11 Vējš, Vilnis. Paradoksāli, bet fakts. Diena newspaper supplement Kultūras Diena, 24 April, 2010. | |
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