Kyiv’s Karas Atelier art gallery has presented a project which is unusual in many respects. In the first place its author, cutting an extraordinary figure, is Badri Gubianuri, a master of colorful abstraction and virtuoso of color nuance, heretofore never known for a bent on conceptual gestures. However, this case is apparently a special one.
The project is titled The Philosopher’s Stone and it envisages the creation of a multitude of simple yet symbolically significant artifacts: glasses with an eternal clockwork sunk in the bottom. These clocks are special, with minute and hour hands, but without faces, so you don’t know what time it really is. The time- glasses are to be mounted as mosaic portraits of noted philosophers, intellectuals, and creative figures of the receiving country, people who somehow or other have pondered time, eternity, and man’s place there. Hundreds of such glasses are included in the exposition and visitors are invited to drink wine from them. If all goes well, the project will be carried out next year. A few words about the concept.
Eternity is the principal notion of the new project. For Badri as an artist reflecting on important lofty categories, the light of ideas and philosophic imperatives shines directly from his canvases. Abstraction is not just a technique, but also a way of thinking; the artist’s talent consists in the ability of conveying an idea visibly, in the concrete nature of things. One such thing, a glass of wine with a clock inexorably ticking at the bottom, is a logical sequel to Badri’s alarmingly shimmering canvases. A voluminous symbol, indeed. Here one finds the vanity of human existence, a reminder of inevitable death and time drained by life: in a word, a meaningful and well-thought-out work of art. Badri does not stop the fleeting moment, but listens to it closely and proposes each of us to do the same, in our own way, using our hearing and taste...
We find a few drops of salvation.
