Igor Tcholaria. Taming the Chaos

Taming the Chaos, a solo exhibition of the work of Igor Tcholaria, numbers some 60 paintings, graphic artworks and sculptures. Igor Tcholaria was born in Abkhazia, which stretches along the coast of the Black Sea. He received his basic grounding in art at the Sukhumi Art School, and subsequently continued his education in Leningrad, at the Vera Mukhina School and the Academy of Arts. When Perestroika arrived, Tcholaria and a group of other street art pioneers started their own little Montmartre in St. Petersburg, just off Nevsky Prospekt. From then on, Tcholaria traveled extensively outside Russia, working for different galleries, primarily in Belgium and the Netherlands. Igor Tcholaria reentered the Russian art scene on the cusp of the 21st century, and now divides his time between St. Petersburg and his home in Belgium on the North Sea coast.

Tcholaria describes his creative method as “retro-perspective”. This hints to us that his artistic language comes from studying the world’s artistic treasures, and from his own experiences calling upon French Impressionism and Post-impressionism and Russian avant-garde art of the early 20th century. He is convinced that the “pictorial units of meaning” elaborated over the centuries may justifiably be quoted in a modern artwork, like citations incorporated in a text otherwise entirely your own. For instance, Tcholaria’s preoccupation with the subjects of the theatre, masks and carnivals may bring to mind the work of James Ensor, while his female portraits evoke images by Amedeo Modigliani and Lado Gudiashvili. Postmodernist techniques have increasingly come into prominence in Tcholaria’s more recent work, yielding intricate, complex and multi-figured compositions harboring the artist’s encoded reflections on life and its passions.