08 Oct - 10 Nov 15
‘Knowledge of one’s self can be disclosed through a dialogue only. I think art is presented to us as an eternal search for this knowledge – as an eternal question, generating new questions in response.’
Huseyn Hagverdi
Huseyn Hagverdi’s art exhibition named ‘Refraction’ evokes another chain reaction of questions leading towards certain reflections that give excitement to the postmodernist times of today, when habitual comprehension of style has took its off. Being applied to Huseyn Hagverdi’s creative practice, refraction of the artistic vision within the show space can be defined as a process of building a dialogue system or – according to the author’s expression – a process of ‘creating galaxy’.
The artist had offered this model for the first time in his ‘Stone’ project (MoMA, Baku, 31.10.2014), where not just a range of sculptures created from the Absheron limestone, but the dialogue principle itself formed the project’s core point: ‘Having asked a question and entangled in one stone, I tried to find the answer in another stone. And there as well, having asked the next question and entangled once again, I used to turn to a newer stone. It sounds almost like ‘Quantum entanglement’! But in my case it turns to be a ‘Stone entanglement’. Our dialogue provides an atmosphere of small galaxy of stones sensitively completing each other, talking to each other, and sharing a common gravity.’ (HH) While seemingly appeared at the intuitive level, the mentioned Quantum physics term actually has more deep grounds, as Hagverdi’s ‘dialogue with stone’ brought him close to the theory by David Bohm, physician-scientist, who had expressed an idea that mind and matter have a deep inner interrelationship, and the mind is somehow hidden in the inanimate matter, and there is a deep unbreakable relationship of each person with the totality that includes both world of nature and mankind.
Hagverdi’s following project was named ‘Beyond the Line’ (Venice Biennale 07.06.2015), and it developed the dialogue system within somehow different plane. Here the dialogue was shaped within a concept of the time bridge uniting our epoch with Azerbaijani underground artists of 1960s. This time Hagverdi’s ‘entanglement’ was displayed clearly. He created a labyrinth of wooden installations painted black; the black chaos appeared to be a metaphor for the life, lived out by his father’s generation. For reaching to the exposition of art by the 1960s’ artists, the show visitors had to pass through that labyrinth. Colour (i.e. its absence), line and material, as represented in this Dialogue system, much more had formed not a galaxy, but a black hole, which absorbed any entering person and immersed him/her into the mental field or ‘the field of consciousness’, proposed in late 1970s by V.Nalimov, mathematician-scientist. According to Nalimov, these fields exist apart from a man and have an analogue nature. When an artist is able to tune himself for receiving these streams, he acquires status of a conductor or a stalker between the real and invisible, over-sensuous worlds.
And now we meet the next grade – art exhibition named ‘Refraction’. It shows absolutely different palette, absolutely different history, but still it deals with the dialogue system, still it takes you beyond the bounds of physical reality. This project could be introduced as exploration of the colour phenomenon, but nature of Hagverdi’s this work doesn’t allow it. He gets going on a hunch, by feel; he enters the dialogue with texture, substance of materials, the dialogue with lines and layered colour stratums, ‘tuning’ himself as a receiver for new ‘airs’ of colours. This process sends us again back to the following quotation from Nalimov: “Some serious mathematicians are deeply convinced that they are not involved with any invention in their creative activities, but what they are doing is discovery of abstract structures existing really and independently.”
Hagverdi constructs his painting system treating it as an alive object, i.e. with dynamical transitions from achromatic gamma to saturated, flamboyant colours, from flatness to shapes, from its each element to the entire of the exhibition space system. Progress from the ‘Stone’ project (dialogue with the matter) and through the labyrinth of the ‘Beyond the Line’ (involving spectators into the dialogue space) towards the current exhibition has been traced herein as well. ‘Dialogue with colours’ turned to provide another resource, found by the artist while his structuring of the exhibition space – exposition of the ‘Refraction’ looks like a whole and complete musical composition containing its exposition, elaboration, final, its central line, main theme and supportive, i.e. connective parties, etc. Transforming well-known quotation from Malevich that music ‘aims at silence’, it can be said about this exhibition that it ‘aims at sounding’. And while introductive parts of the exhibition (‘Introduction’, ‘Silence’, ‘Genesis’ series) sound like reflections on the human consciousness and great illusion of reality, its conclusive parts (‘Phases’; ‘Refraction’, ‘Toccata’, ‘Gaval’ series) are like a spacewalk, escape to a space of the matter-n-spirit unity, to a dialogue of the mind and body, reality and its image existing just in our minds.
Fariza Babayeva
Musician, critic, journalist