Clear roots in past cultures rarely synthesise with a sharp and exact feeling for modernity. Particularly when modernity implies not the sum of contemporary and fashionable devices or a master key opening the door to the mainstream, but a means of giving resonance to the codes of today and preserving the unique intonation of one's own content and plastics.
Latif Kazbekovwill soon celebrate his fiftieth anniversary. The Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi once said that when we are no longer children, we are already dead. In other words, we lose our naivety and ability to develop when we cease to wonder. There does not seem to be any danger of this happening to Kazbekov. His professional life is full of potential, experience and an irrepressible interest in new artistic experiments.
Kazbekov studied in Alma-Ata and then in Leningrad (now St Petersburg). His teacher at the Academy of Arts was Gennady Yepifanov, an outstanding engraver, designer and connoisseur of art with precise and impeccable taste. Kazbekov later worked with Valentin Kurdov, helping and learning from him. A subtle watercolourist and virtuoso book graphic artist who had known the leading members of the Petrograd avant-garde, Kurdov retained the culture and courage of the art of his youth. Kazbekov thus acquired another opportunity to perfect his oeuvre.
The Chinese painter Shi Tao wrote: "Learning the rules, you will be successful in the changes".The superb schooling received by Kazbekov gave him the freedom to engage in independent quests.
An acknowledged illustrator, particularly of children's books, Latif Kazbekov received many official commissions in the Soviet period. Books that he had illustrated were published in enormous print runs. Today, he is equally prominent. The only different is that his interests have grown more profound and he is much more demanding of himself.
Kazbekov's world consists of large-scale watercolours free of both rectilinear verisimilarity and consistent non-figurativeness. A connoisseur and admirer of such European classics of the 1920s as Max Ernst, the artist consciously senses his exact place in the temporal and spatial contexts of both the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. Kazbekov, however, is far removed from direct Surrealist variations. He is a free artist of his own time, conveying his sensations of external, internal and even subconscious life in extremely individualist watercolours.
Kazbekov's watercolours are full of refined and restrained meaning.
Pouring into a channel of unruffled, lucid, "structured" intelligence, the liberated, mobile substance of the subconscious is realised in simple, extremely lifelike forms endowed with high meaning.
An inherent feature of Kazbekov's sheets is the presence of calm. This is not a given calm, but the result of a long and clandestine artistic trek towards harmony and equilibrium.
This path is long and based on hard, painstaking work - from his own hand-made paper to watereolour conjuring tricks in which the technical sacraments are subordinated to artistic improvisation. The sheet of paper becomes an entire world incorporating a compressed notion of colour, form and space. By definition, there cannot be any illusion of volume or depth in Kazbekov's watercolours. Although the space is flat, the paper is deep and enigmatic. Its magical artistic (not spatial) depth has its own laws and dimensions (and not just three dimensions!). Kazbekov's works can reveal the historical, aristocratic tranquillity of the Versailles alleys or the chilling magic of the Laguna Veneta at dawn. Most of all, however, this is internal artistic life; the thoughts and feelings of a master whose brush and fantasy have turned hand-made, virtually animate paper into a wholly independent, self-valuable phenomenon following its own laws.
Latif Kazbekov's artistic world is great. His sensations of life and art include audacious experiments - combinations of painting and relief; textural "dialogues" -and a profound culture constantly aspiring towards perfection. The artist is always recognisable and always new. He alone knows the price of this unwavering movement and faithfulness to oneself, while the grateful and active viewer is instilled with the belief that genuine quality and individuality still remain a synonym for artistic merit.
Prof. Dr. MikhaH GERMAN
Member of the Ubera! Arts Academy,
Member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA),
Senior curator of contemporary art, Russian Museum, St Petersburg
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"The Paper Games of Latif Kazbekov"
I first saw diverse works of hand-cast paper in a shop window in Paris in the late 1980s. I was struck by the immaculate, dazzling beauty of their forms. The sheets were like swans' wings - fragile, airy and simultaneously robust. They seemed to incarnate the spirit of the high craft that once flourished in medieval Europe.
The poetry of paper - a universal image of culture - strikes a chord in the hearts and minds of all those linked to the world of grammata - reading and writing. Such people are not indifferent to the paper on which an old copy of the Gospels or an engraving by Albrecht Durer is printed.
Connoisseurs of hand-made paper regard this form of "handicraft" as a deliberate gesture of defiance, a challenge to the uniform and mechanical monotony of the paper that now symbolises modem civilisation. The smooth and even A4 format turns the finest words and colours into faceless nonentities.
Latif Kazbekov lives in the world of book culture - and not only because an important aspect of his professional biography is illustrations for almost one-hundred books. The artist thinks in categories typical of this particular realm of human activities. Such literary thinking organises the plastic forms, evokes associations, and contrasts and connects, in a single dramatic whole, the anonymous Compositions in which the artist consistently develops his main ideas - to protect the living world from the threat of self-destruction and to uphold traditional spaces. One of the most exciting things for the artist is the chance to revive ancient formulae and recreate the unique "flesh" of a sheet of paper.
Although Kazbekov is deeply immersed in the very process of creation, the aspiration to create is subordinated to the efforts of production, in which the accidental occurrences are, in turn, preprogrammed. Refined and reddish strips, formed from drops of rusty water and carefully organised by the brush, which washes away the unwanted, arise in a composite "layered" sheet. The multi-layered pourings let the master wash away the superfluous and model the borders of the form, employing diverse means of drying the paper.
Kazbekov's application of natural materials in hand casting offer a fascinating insight into the profound traditions of this old handicraft - raw cotton, flax stalks and flowers, such natural dyes as river and marsh weeds, mosses, the bark of a sunken tree, bilberries and the petals of dry flowers. Inventing new "concoctions" and enjoying a masterly command of old ones, Kazbekov moves freely in the creative process. A member of the postmodernist generation, he is well aware of the importance of the concept of "surface" in modern art. At the heart of the artist's paper compositions lie a firm carcass, around which rough and virtually tangible masses are distributed. These masses bring out the colour and intensify the weight and density. Kazbekov's sheets cannot, however, be likened to the image of a swan. Cardinally different, planned and finished, they are the result of another task.
Latif Kazbekov can, without exaggeration, be called a master of high graphic technologies. His compositions of recent years, created from handmade paper, embody carefully encoded professional secrets, in a cunning game of artistic guesswork. How does he do it? And do such questions have or even need an answer?
Dr Natalia Kozyreva
Senior curator of drawing,
Russian Museum, St Petersburg
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© Arslonga.ru 2002