|
|
| GREY MATTER: Kirils Panteļejevs Ieva Lejasmeijere To say something light and precise about an artist who works lightly and precisely comes neither lightly nor precisely. I am offering a finicky and quite heavy, yet sufficiently truthful claim that Kirils Panteļejevs is one of the most brilliant flowers in the bouquet of contemporary Latvian sculptors. He was born in Riga on 11th April 1969. He graduated from the Sculpting department of the Latvian Academy of Art in 1994 and spent a year at Humboldt University in the USA. Since 1995 he has had six solo exhibitions in various Riga galleries and has participated in group shows in Latvia and abroad. He has consistently taken part in the annual exhibitions organised by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, in the Bolderāja environmental art actions, the open-air exhibitions at Pedvāle and in the Riga International Sculpture Quadrennials. He teaches in the Sculpture Department of the Riga Secondary School of Art and Design. In 2002 he received the Annual Prize of the Latvian Artists' Union and the Culture Capital Foundation for the best environmental object - "Float" on the Daugava river by the Noass gallery. ("Float" was a joint effort with Iveta Laure. It is a figure of an ice angler in the spirit of trivial realism, "sitting" on a polystyrene ice floe.) Kirils Panteļejevs works with sculpture, sculpture and sculpture. In the traditional and non-traditional expressions, as well as in those that are far from sculpture, we can sense a constructive and precise approach to the material and the concept. The idea is formulated profoundly and clearly, but at the same time, lightly and without saturating or complicating perception of the work. In Buddhist calm, so to speak. The artist's attitude towards his profession is well demonstrated by his 1996 work "Point and Plane" in Pedvāle. To this day it is his most labour intensive work. | |
|
It took almost all spring to build a concrete dam in the required hollow and to create a kind of pond. Underneath it all I had to fit a pipe into which water would flow as if into a whirlpool. As we know, a calm water surface is ideally smooth and a whirlpool is centred around a single point. And that's what I had to achieve.
Tell us, please, about your sculptor's relationships with the material! I don't have any principle relationships with the material. I have no particular favourite. As a beginner I paid greater attention to the material's technological properties. But more and more I am interested in the material's symbolic meaning, its history. For a time it was water, but now I have no favourite. Possibly on occasion - fire. Stone? Stone carving is a special and physically quite demanding technology. On the one hand difficult, but on the other, the material itself eases the situation. The self-worth of stone is so great that it can be split apart and suddenly everything is right there in front of you. Perhaps that's what I don't particularly like about stone, its high self-worth. But I wanted to master the technique for the experience, in order to know what is this thing - stone. For the "Nature II" and "Nature III" exhibitions in the Artists' Union gallery I had works from clay, covered with film so they wouldn't dry out. Under the film of "Greenhouse Effect" in the first exhibition we saw some fine condensation - both a freshness and a heat effect. For the second exhibition, I made a brain from fresh grey artist's clay. It turned out that only minimal effort was needed to transform a lump of clay into a brain - one kind of grey matter turned into another kind of grey matter. Clay is a perfect plastic material. Everything is initially made of clay - from items of jewellery to monuments. On the other hand, the brain dictates everything that happens with the clay. For my solo exhibition "Sculpture" in the M6 gallery (part of the 1996 project "Identity and Distance"), I had gathered all manner of metal objects from a tip in the country. These things that had lost their function were taken out of their environment, cleaned, polished and exhibited on a buffed granite surface. This scrap metal had to attain the identity of sculpture. The material was bared to the maximum yet the form was retained. That was essential. They looked like sweets. Precisely. It was a very sweet exhibition. Every material demands not a simple approach but a different concept. The more different materials you've mastered, the easier it is to formulate the objective. The more deeply and completely you know a material, the less you want to work with it, because I am not that interested in delving into a material's possibilities. Working with wax figures began as a sideline for the money, but turned into an interesting event, and who knows, perhaps I'll use these figures again somehow. "Float" combined both a traditionally realistic wax figure with performance elements - an artist in a rubber dinghy is pulling an ice floe with an angler. In 1998 in Poland I took part for the first time in a kind of performance festival. Regular actions were organised in this former military base, very similar to Bolderāja, but these last at least two weeks. The atmosphere was so liberating that I had a go too. The audience really liked my first attempt and I began to receive invitations to participate in other similar events. What did I do? I filled quite a large hall with fallen leaves, climbed into a children's bath to wet my drawers (well, others wet their T-shirts), did some wriggling and began to rake the leaves together - I drove the viewers around the whole hall. Finally I gathered together a large pile in which I could hide and I literally went to ground. The table burning action in Bolderāja was in a very small circle of friends. Just like the leaf gathering, we are talking about man's relationships with the external world. Only the leaf gathering wasn't so laconic. Another quite successful performance was in Finland, at the "Exit" festival. It happened in a hall with doors leading to all kinds of rooms. Behind one of them I began to hammer at the door to let me in, but when the public tried to open the door, I didn't let them. I just became more agitated, banging the door even more and cursing. They even found a spare key or something similar, but nevertheless they couldn't open the door - I was determined not to let them in. And so I became more and more wild. When the public began to get worried that there really was something wrong with the person behind the door and the whole situation, I came out and gave a bow. I don't know how they really took it, but the aim was noble. In a word, the European Union and other problems of social life. At the Art Days in Bialystock I "distributed" spiritual nourishment. I passed along the viewers in a white shirt, read table prayers in Latvian, and tossed paper plates into the air for the public to catch. For the Poles, these types of event are very well attended. They are mad for art. What do you look at in art, what do you like in art? This kind of question puts me in an awkward position, because the respondent can't refer to anything. But I like this kind of situation. Perhaps that's why I like performance art. You can work with nothing in a situation when you have no materials or technical means. Thinking about the problems of technical means, I suddenly had this vision of artists being dumped somewhere where there is nothing (a desert perhaps) and there they had to create something. No equipped studios or comfortable surroundings. Not being tied to some influential circumstances, for me this situation might be ideal. A desert can also be sufficiently inspirational. In Latvia, the Bolderāja actions are the closest I get to these conditions I like so much. I don't like to think about what I would need to create. These questions don't usually arise. That's why I like to participate in crazy, impromptu events. I'm not interested in what material possibilities there may be. I like to study art. If we try to study something more closely - the structure of matter or, God forbid, the structure of the world as a whole - we come to the conclusion that, at the beginning a structure appears, crystalline lattices, then molecules and atoms. And if we go as far as possible, it turns out that in the very depths, there is essentially nothing there - just some charges of energy. And even these may be further sub-divided. It turns out that everything consists of nothing, from a void where exchange of energy takes place. Of course, if we accept that we live in a material world, this becomes highly relative. If art is something beyond reality, beyond reason, a kind of pretension to see something invisible, then, in order to understand reality what we really need is artistic feeling. At the very core materialistic thinking does not help. The ephemeral nature of art is not as ephemeral as one would think. It affords the opportunity to understand more or less what is happening around you. Are you looking for the answer through form? Form is a relative description. We nevertheless live in a visually perceptible world with its appropriate means of expression. An elementary principle of rationalism tells us that we use what is at hand - our eyes. There are the rules, the order of the world. But I see the highest mission of art as its possibility of helping us to imagine the "common picture". I just have this inquiring tendency. I can inquire into anything. Perhaps I reduce it to the material because by taking any example from the material world, we can arrive at many general conclusions. How do you see radishes, for example, as the completeness of form? Sometimes it seems that the forms of nature are quite enough. You can always take something, examine it and find the same thing that you were looking for when creating something. But then there is no communication - an intensive work of consciousness. Just as in literature there are words, in visual art there is a visually perceptible language of images. Actually, all art revolves around the question how to show it. And 90% of art is produced by manipulating the means of expression and all manner of side effects - fashion trends, politics, ascribing material value to non-material values and so on. Many events turn into parades of stylish objects. Working with things in their pure form, with these beautiful radishes, for example, one can't find the means whereby the artist's ideas may be expressed. The range of proportions between research and presentation can fluctuate. Strange, but when I do something for the first time, I get maximum results; especially where performances are concerned. It's not the same afterwards. It has nothing to do with so-called beginner's luck. It's rather the experience gained in other fields playing a positive role; there's a kind of nervousness and your maximum output, because you're going for something you don't yet know. That allows you to understand why I and others work in art at all. Don't you find reproducing and repeating performances confusing? It certainly is confusing when a process is somehow reproduced, but art is not at fault here. What else is there? In general, publicity and the frequency of the work is very important for performances. It also depends on your needs - if you want to be at the top, you have to maintain the appropriate frequency. But the higher the frequency, the more difficult it is to maintain a wide range. Which of the achievements by other artists do you like? I'm usually quiet and say little when asked this question because I don't wish to ruin the tone of the conversation. I like some things, but to be frank, not much. Usually I dislike almost everything. And not that I'm a critic by nature. I simply feel what I like. But, I'm ashamed to say, it happens so rarely. Now everyone will think I'm an arrogant creature. Does a sculptor have a special relationship with the public environment? Work for the public space is very specific. I've entered competitions for public objects on a couple of occasions. That was enough for me to understand how different it is from everything I'd like to do. I still haven't found that special approach required for a public work. In the public space, art's logical relationships with market conditions are sharpened to the limit. The proportion between creativity and the market conditions changes. But there are also relationships of a different nature. The work "Invisible Walls" from the "House in Bolderāja" action experienced a strange public reaction. It was a jar, full of water, simply standing and provoking the local community. It was as if to test whether a wall works if it is only marked off by a string. That same day the jar was stolen or smashed. Thus one could come to the conclusion that only visible walls work, because invisible ones do not. But that didn't especially hurt. If the opportunity crops up to express myself, I don't need anything more. Of course, I try to work creatively when I'm driven by some positive impulse. The desire to do something can't come from a negative disposition. | |
| go back | |
