Elene Chantladze

The Georgian artist Elene Chantladze’s two exhibitions at Anton Kern and kaufmann repetto consist of small, highly emotional works painted in a highly suggestive, but very loose, manner. The artist uses copy paper, cardboard, and other inexpensive, non-art sources, which lends the art its ad hoc ambience. The rough-shod quality of the materials, along with their improvisatory imagery, gives the small paintings, drawings, and painted stones an aura of pictorial disarray. The strength of Chantladze’s feeling is perceived through imagery that is deliberately imprecise rather than detailed. Instead of detailed imagery we receive an indistinct impression, so that her audience experiences emotion rather than an intellectual bias.

The show at Anton Kern offers a good number of small works, very small painted stones. These works use the naive to communicate joyousness. There is an untitled work, made in 2021, of two women standing in a field, created with white strokes as well as a white background higher up. They are accompanied by red flowers, roses likely; most of them are seen on the right side of the composition. The women themselves have shoulder-length black hair; the woman on the left wears a red dress, while the woman on the right wears a dark blue shirt and knee-length black pants. The colors, along with the rough style of the imagery, are presented with the innocence of naive art.

Another painting offers an equally poetic, symbolic landscape. In this piece, a figure with a white featureless face holds an animal of some sort (perhaps a rabbit) to his chest and stands in the middle of the composition, created with gouache on copy papers and cardboard. Around the entire body is a penumbra of bright blue sky. To the left is a roughly painted image of a tree, worked out in light brown and white. To the right is a sideways view of a woman. Again, the artist is suggestive rather than specific, but working in this way enables her to move into intuitive report. It is an excellent means of presenting emotional intelligence.

At kaufmann repetto, downstairs from the first floor, Chantladze offers a very similar array of small paintings and a vitrine of painted stones. In an untitled, undated watercolor and pencil image, a mother duck leads ducklings to the left across a green field. Just ahead of the mother are several small red flowers. Above the birds is a narrow horizon of white, and above that, a slate gray sky. It is direct in its presentation, one likely originating with the artist’s experience of the landscape around her. The small painting is very attractive, moving in its direct delivery. Chantladze’s delivery is nearly childlike, but her age is more than seventy-five years.

In another small, untitled painting we find three swimmers, mostly submerged in the sea. One swims a bit behind the other two, their dark hair topping the waters. The water envelops them, taking up most of the composition. In the upper left, a group of boats with white sails takes up that space. Again, like all of the artist’s imagery, direct vision occurs, not philosophical reverie. This means that the innocence a figure is given depends on the way the picture is painted, rather than being structured by an idea.

The intimacy of Chantladze’s work lends it a diaristic aspect. This way of working is informal in the extreme. But it seems as if the function of time connects the everyday activities and views in her art. Life outside is emphasized; it looks as if the spell of light and water and sky and grass is offered without obvious pride of authorship. The experience is visual rather than psychological or abstract. Now that we are inundated by technology and are dominated by a conceptual framework, Chantladze’s work, concentrating on everyday life, feels terribly human, accessible to her audience. The gods, intrinsic to our sense of well-being, would surely embrace her gifts—original because of their self-effacement and lack of rhetoric.