THE WEKUA ZONE and everything that is hiding in the room of memories

by Elda Oreto

There is always space in the Unknown. When something or someone is a foreigner, a stranger, it always leaves room open to infinite possibilities. And as an indefinite space, it is always possible to fill it. You can always grow more in and out of it, you can develop and evolve in multiple directions. It comes natural to think about Space when we talk about the ‘unknown’ and the ‘indefinite’, yet the concept of Time is implicit in it.
However the concepts of Space and Time are so far away from the way we navigate them daily in our life.
The artistic research of Andro Wekua focuses on finding the forms of space that shows us what life would be like if time did not exist. The Georgian artist, who lives and works between Berlin and Zurich, creates atmospheres full of tension that oscillate between reality and dream, abstraction and narration, seduction and renunciation. In It Seems Like That (2021), the solo show at the Sprüth Magers gallery in Berlin held this year in September on the occasion of the special edition of the Gallery Weekend organized due to the pandemic, the artists presents five paintings inside a white room where an equally white curtain obscures the view of the landscape outside the window. Wekua’s exhibition has to be experienced without any external distraction. It is a path of introspection.

The title of the show comes from one of the paintings: a portrait that represents the figure of a young person, neither male nor female, outlined by a simple blue line of painting, leaning against a very delicate balustrade sketched in pencil, barely perceptible on the white canvas. The line that draws the figure is at the same time a definition, the affirmation of an individual, but also the possibility of containing within itself an infinity of possible identities, the alterity. The white of the canvas wraps the figure, it seems as if it’s not really left uncompleted as the white is not showing emptiness, it represents a container. The figure appears to be embedded in the white sheet, floating in a Limbo, the distant gaze looks away, the landscape is behind its back. In this ‘Wekua Zone’ time is suspended in an eternal wait, an endless present, in which the artist embeds fragments of life, memories, motifs that have been repeated throughout his artistic practice for about twenty years in paintings, collages, installations, films. A constellation of symbols such as the house, the self-portrait, animals, masks, scars and cars.

June (2021) takes up the classic motif of ‘still life’: a long-stemmed blue rose flakes off in abstraction in the middle of two flowers, one pink and the other one red. The images seem to melt on the surrounding surface which becomes a whole full of color that embeds the figures. Andro Wekua’s research is in constant evolution but there is always a mysterious, almost esoteric atmosphere, as if his work came either from a very ancient time or from the distant future. Half Moon (2017/2021) is a portrait of a female profile, oil on canvas, which covers half of the surface, while the other half is filled with an indefinite mass always in the shade of blue that touches the nape of the figure. Wekua’s paintings have a material intensity, the pictorial images, however, show something that goes beyond appearance and in the game of representations, symbolism and surrealism become actions, acting on the observer.

Painting is the starting point of his artistic practice. The artist was born in 1977 in Sokhumi, in Abkhazia, a region in Georgia that was part of the Soviet Union. In the early 1990s, his father was killed during a demonstration for the independence of the territory, shortly after he moved to Switzerland with his family. The memory of this traumatic past constantly re-emerges in Wekua’s artistic practice even though his work is not looking neither for consolation nor a solution but everything in his works is inextricably marked by life and real experience. Having started painting since he was a child in Georgia, he later attended the school of Dornach in Switzerland where he followed Rudolf Steiner’s method of anthroposophical education. According to Steiner’s theories, the intensity of the painting has transformative properties on the observer and reveals aspects of humanity that are hidden. The encounter with this method and with these theories has deeply affected him and in about twenty years of career he has developed a body of work that mixes personal experience and the ordinary together with ghosts and abstractions, bringing together the interrupted past with a fragmented present. Nonlinear time also lacks circularity.

Wekua has exhibited in solo shows in many public and private institutions among the many: Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (both 2018), Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2016), Benaki Museum, Athens (2014), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Kunsthalle Friedericianum, Kassel (both 2011), Wiels, Brussels, Museion Bolzano (both 2010), Museum Bojmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2007), and KunstMuseum Winterthur (2006). Selected group exhibitions include: Haus der Kunst, Munich (2019), Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles, Albertina Museum, Vienna (both 2018), Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2016), the High-Line Art, New York (2015), Pinakothek der Moderne & Brandhorst Museum, Munich (2015), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014), Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2013), New Museum, New York, 54th Venice Biennale (both 2011), Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich (2008), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2006), and 4th Berlin Biennale, Berlin (2004). Many of his paintings include the use of different techniques and involve collages. These, which recall a surrealist approach, start from a reserve of personal images, family photos, portraits. Like seams, the images are combined together to build an impossible continuity. E. Portrait, Square Wave (2018) combines a photo of the artist’s daughter with an image of a hand, a palm tree and a unicorn. The proportions of the images are altered, so the portrait takes up most of the surface and the blue color covers the painting by closing the gaps between the images. In Untitled (Ledersofa) (2018), a portrait of the artist as a boy also fills most of the surface of the work. They are daydreams and nightmares and it is not explained where these images mixed together came from.

The incorporation of the silk screen print technique into his research has allowed Wekua to extend in series the practice of collages with the reproduction of motifs that trace his imagery. In the W. Portrait series (2016-2017) the artist uses a photograph of himself sitting on a sofa surrounded by yellow paint, the room that supposedly surrounds him in the photo is completely removed and substituted by the dazzling yellow color, a tonality that together with an electric blue and pink shocking comes back in his work. The same occurs in A. Portrait Spectator (2018) in which the portrait of the artist surrounded by blue is the silkscreen reproduction of an image also used in a collage but completely isolated from its context. The repetition of a motif in series almost underlines the impossibility of grasping the original instant, that unique moment that opened an event. The portrait of the artist is as if suspended in the Wekua Zone, which is an interlude in time, a pause that extends to infinity. In this strange ambivalent dimension, memory plays an important role,the intensity of his experience is so strong to push Wekua to create various doppelgänger to distance himself, to project him outside himself.

Get Out of My Room, Part 2 (2006) is a mannequin of a teenager who wears only a white shirt and loafers, the figure is sitting without pants with his legs crossed resting on a large table, one of those you could imagine to find in the conference rooms of a large corporation or a bank. On his face a slightly frowned expression and on the eyes a patina of pink and white paint obscures his sight, literally closing the mannequin gaze and the possibility of seeing. Behind it some collages are on display. The image of the teenager is a recurring theme, they don’t have a definite gender, they must be a messenger, almost always sitting, a bit bored, with sneakers, as in Gott ist tot aber das Mädchen nicht (2008) where a girl is sitting on a chair inside a huge glass case, or in in My Bike and Your Swamp (2008) where the mannequin is seated on a replica of a black motorcycle with its back to the front, wearing a wig and the usual sneakers, with the eyes closed, lost in thought. In Untitled (2011) the mannequin is lying on a table, wearing a black tank top and, again, white sneakers. We cannot see the face because the head is wedged inside a miniature model of a house that covers almost half of the table, a house that could have easily been based in reality. But even this is an abstraction, without furniture it hosts the boy’s head, immersing him in the past, it closes its accessibility from the outside, it is almost an act of renunciation. The house is an abstraction of the environment that surrounds us and Wekua operates the same closure to the outside also in the exhibition environment.

For Some Pheasants in Singularity at the Sprüth Magers gallery in London, he created a scene that absorbs the viewer in a subtle way. Untitled (2014) is a female figure, with a blond wig and a robotic prosthetic arm that moves artificially, she is standing in a dazzling white room with a pink carpet floor, suspended from the ground with her chin resting on a transparent glass plate. The Space is a symbol no less than the mannequin that it is hosting, in the room next door another figure is sitting backwards on a huge black wolf, the window is obscured from the outside by a brick wall, which from the inside is blending with the white walls. A beam of artificial light is giving a glimpse of the show to whoever is outside as an invitation to enter another dimension. These figures are personifications, symbols for actions they perform, like quotes in a dream, the abstractions are at the same time the only actual real thing. Wekua’s work strongly recalls surrealism, symbolism and a certain atmosphere, oscillating reality between artificial and natural.

In the installations some things are clearly perceived, others vanish to the border between memory and dream as an event that by now has not preserved anything of the real experience. Wekua’s mannequins are therefore the actors of a play in which the artist doesn’t have or want to have a role anymore. They don’t have eyes or have closed them because they don’t look forward to the spectator, it is a road to introspection but also a liberation because these images built with his installations or paintings penetrate daily reality and distort it. In his films, Wekua articulates this constellation of memories, images, dreams and realities in a narrative sequence that reinvents time, it might be as the long sequence of documentary images in Sicut Lilium Inter Spina (Like a Lily in the back), 2003 – where we can see a young Weekua in his father’s arms – or like the narrative that moves to a dreamlike horizon populated by mannequins and ghosts in By the window, 2008, in Never Sleep With in Strawberry in Your Mouth II, 2010/2012, which also includes digital animation or in the most abstract All is Fair in Dreams and War, 2018. The Wekua Zone is precisely this unknown limbo between illusion and reality, the place of a shortcoming, which generates an identity. But this is not just a psychological or spiritual event, the withdrawal in an inner world, abstracting reality to modify it is a political gesture of taking distance from a world that does not recognize us and we do not recognize as ours.