PRESENTATION: Karlo Kacharava-Sentimental Traveller

Georgian artist and writer Karlo Kacharava was feverishly prolific. A polymathic figure living in Tbilisi of the late 1980s and early ’90s, he produced paintings, essays, poetry, and art criticism as if possessed by some secret knowledge that his would be a short life: He died in 1994 of an aneurysm at the age of thirty.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: S.M.A.K. Archive

Karlo Kacharava was born at a time when his native Georgia was part of the Soviet Union, and died in the early years of its independence. He lived through Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalising glasnost, and then the turmoil of economic collapse, reincarnated nationalism, and the war that emerged in its wake. Zoom out a little and we see Kacharava’s Georgia in the context of outside forces; a small country on the periphery of both Europe and Asia; a national story written by its struggle to preserve its identity in the face of bigger powers trying to keep Georgia in its orbit. It was quite a canvas. Witnessing Georgia’s battle to define itself in those often violent years mirrored a similar kind of searching within the multi-talented Kacharava, who also couldn’t entirely define himself. “He was sure he was a poet, and he thought he was better at writing,” remembers his sister, Lika Kacharava. “It took him a long time to believe he was an artist”. “Sentimental Traveller” is Karlo Kacharava’s first solo exhibition in a museum outside Georgia and it brings his inventive visual world to a much wider audience. His paintings, works on paper and illustrated diaries are amongst his most famous works. Although he died at the age of thirty, Kacharava left behind volumes of poetry, art criticism and cultural commentary. His legacy is the distinctive style that helped usher in a new wave of Georgian avant-gardism. Depictions of human figures, quotes and dedications, storytelling, family relationships, urban scenes, landscapes, references and poetry are just some of the themes that he developed throughout his career. Kacharava also created complex and refined systems and constellations through which his art, poetry and art criticism evolved. The exhibition features a wide range of Karlo Kacharava’s paintings and works on paper, together with photographs of the artist by his contemporary and friend, Guram Tsibakhasvili. This visual journey is punctuated by archival material, including a documentary video featuring Kacharava. These rich constellations are displayed as sequences of different bodies of work in an immersive environment. Its methodology is inspired by Kacharava’s use of storyboards and his unique modes of storytelling. The exhibition charts the course of Karlo Kacharava’s peripatetic life, which he spent between Tbilisi, Cologne, Madrid, Paris, Berlin and Moscow, amongst other places. These different periods are identified and deconstructed according to the chronological development and major themes in his oeuvre. “Bible” (1987), a watercolor on paper, limns a typically disquieting and ambiguous scene. Two morose-looking women are marooned in an off-kilter room. One directs a burning stare straight at the viewer; the other, shrunken in the corner of the frame, gazes away. Perspective is characteristically askew, so that the holy book of the title floats free of the table on which it should be sitting, pinning down the staring girl’s arm like a deadweight. Doomed romantics and isolated dreamers drift through Kacharava’s oeuvre, multiplying like doppelgängers. His is a private world of cultic obsession—the lonely image worship of an eternal teenager stuck in his own head. In “English Romanticism” (1992), a goth couple with pale, drawn faces and black hair wander across a windswept field. The word LONDON appears in small letters in the streaked-blue sky along with a miasmic haze of esoteric symbols: phallic scribbles, hearts, and sickle-shaped moons. Indeed, the characters in his work have a fairy-tale quality—they are more symbols than people—while language is conjured like a spell. In “Sentimental Journey” (1993), we see a similar-looking cast of characters from this lugubrious family tree—pallid, glowering, enigmatic—arranged on a winding hilltop road. A cannon smokes behind one woman; a gas lamp hangs in midair. The palette of slate grays and venous blues emphasizes the frozen emotional landscape. Various scripts—Latin, Georgian—murmur across the canvas, a cryptic code promising entrance into another dimension. Kacharava’s stylized aesthetic borrows heavily from cartoons and cinema. “Perversion of Kings” (1993), has a bleak, noirish feel: Against a background of skyscrapers, a black-suited figure in shades swaggers by, holding a cigarette. My “Daughter Is a Prison Ballerina” (1992), is more improvisatory and playful. The left side of the canvas is divided into cells like a comic strip. A woman’s face tilts upward; a bare-chested dancer poses in a tutu. Collaged with the stubs of Parisian theater tickets and blue-and-white Gitanes cigarette boxes, the work is typical Kacharava: an elliptical series of signs and gestures, with his oblique doodles (a trumpet-playing rabbit, a blue pine) trailing the canvas like clues. Morbidity and passion reverberate throughout these works. There’s the miniature bloodred interior of “Dead” (1997); the cadaverous sitter in “Do you think so” (1993). Kacharava’s works burn like candles lit to honor his idols. “Susan Sontag” (1992_, reimagines the American intellectual’s avant-garde polemic “Against Interpretation” (1964), as a kind of graphic novel in brash letters and geometric shapes. “PS to the General” (1990), uses wild brushstrokes of sunflower yellows and burning oranges to immortalize an army officer and his flame-haired lover. Yet whether the artist’s homage is to Nick Cave or Cy Twombly, everyone in Kacharava World is reduced to the same rubric: a brooding storybook image full of strange and seductive conformity.

Photo: Karlo Kacharava, Für Kuitca, 1993, pen and black ink on paper, 21 x 30 cm, Courtesy the Estate of Karlo Kacharava, Tbilisi, and Modern Art, London

Info: Curators: Liesje Vandenbroeck and Karima Boudou, S.M.A.K., Jan Hoetplein 1, Ghent, Belgium, Duration: 2/12/2023-14/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 9:30-17:30, Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, https://smak.be