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| Home Alone Zane Onckule, Art Critic Kristaps Ģelzis. HOME VIDEO 10.12.-30.01.2009. Gallery "Alma" | |
 View from the exhibition. Photo: Martins Vizbulis | |
| In a world where it is unclear to whom it belongs - whether to good or to evil, when society and its past experience fails in its attempts to provide the individual with a meaning in life and with true values, we can only speculate as to whether there is any sense in recreating this meaning again. People cannot agree on a common vision, and accepted standards change at a dizzying rate. As a result it is hard to find pleasure in day to day existence or to feel the high of being alive. But if we are to carry on living, we need to make decisions. What truly has value? What is the best that we can do? It is a paradox: the more things and opportunities we are given, the more we encounter a loss of freedom and cannot find values to believe in, which we would be prepared to pursue. Kristaps Ģelzis' new project also relates to art as a gesture of survival in today's unclear world. Here Ģelzis uses a technique first seen in his works for the Cēsis 2008 art festival. Acrylic paintings are shown under fluorescent light, and like a real Christmastime display came to bring light (art) into the darkest year of the month. December is a month for lamentation and depression, a time to be isolated and alone at home. But then, perhaps not? Ģelzis' work examines "home" as a special place to be, where emotions fluctuate within the confines of the inhabitant's personal experience. Here we can see subservience, playfulness, longing etc. All of the works are connected with the theme of HOME, which can just as easily be extended to the description ALONE. "Home" or potential sanctuary. A place to rest, and recover from public and professional life. On the other hand, being home alone means loneliness and non-involvement in social or public life. Home Video is a performance for everyone's own living room, because the artist has darkened the exhibition hall and transformed it into a temporary space for watching actual screens - paintings lit up in various colours. This a game played in the language of video art, but without the video itself, instead offering acrylic paintings illuminated by fluorescent lights, which we see in bright blue, red, orange and yellow tones. But is there any movement, any action in this "video" painting? This was hinted at - preparing viewers for a journey further into their channels of perception - by the work entitled "Entertainment Programme" in the first room of the gallery: a white plaster Mickey Mouse head fixed on an eloquent black background. The action in HOME VIDEO is realistically unreal, critical and entertaining at the same time. Various items (shoes, underwear, the Mickey Mouse head already mentioned etc.) are used in the exhibition as props for revealing the artist's interests and thoughts. The power of these thoughts is linked with the work "Walking the Blue Dog", which is a vertical painting in a blue-green tones, at the foot of which, on the gallery's parquet floor, is a "present" from this same dog. Ģelzis generates a feeling of scale and unity without noticeable weight, and creates tension between the sculpturally-formed objects (the only spatial form without a supporting background - the surfaces of a painting, which in this exhibition was the work "It will be sunny all day": a bright yellow object, a house - as a frame without walls) and the space as a whole. This is abstract painting with a three-dimensional effect, which is created by a particular light, also drawing in the viewer (the fields of white of his or her own possessions and clothing) directly into (matching and illuminating) the exhibition's mood. In conclusion, it must be pointed out that, as always, Kristaps Ģelzis' expression of artistic will is more powerful than the material, because viewed separately, the constituent elements of HOME VIDEO (acrylic, canvas, paper and plaster) lose their significance, become unremarkable and visibly grow sad. /Translator into English: Filips Birzulis/ | |
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