MYSTERIA

“Mysterious Mystery” (2015), by contemporary Georgian artist Zaal Bachanashvili, was acquired directly from his studio on the Tbilisi Sea. It is a welcoming space with large windows and a garden where flowers grow alongside persimmon and apple trees. Among the many canvases and drawings, reproductions of the Blue Angel of Kintsvisi — one of medieval Georgia’s most celebrated frescoes — recur in different corners of the studio.

In Bachanashvili’s abstract, lyrical compositions, the canvas becomes a meeting place for the real and the imagined, the human and the spiritual, the earthly and the heavenly. In “Mysterious Mystery”, faces, figures and fine scratched lines barely emerge against a light, almost white background. They seem to arise from emptiness and dissolve into it, turning the painting into something like a vision. The image never becomes fully fixed; it continues to emerge before the viewer’s eyes.

One of the artist’s central motifs is a white circle, or a fragment of one. It first appears in the late 1980s, during a turbulent period in Georgian history, and often becomes the centre of the composition. Bachanashvili associates the white circle and the colour white with goodness, purity, humanity, mercy and love of God. The movement of figures around the light-filled centre can be seen as an image of the human aspiration from the earthly towards the spiritual.

This turn towards the sacred was characteristic of Georgian artists of the 1980s generation. Under Soviet ideology and official atheism, an interest in faith became a form of inner resistance, while a turn to Orthodox art and fresco painting offered a way to maintain a connection with cultural memory. In Bachanashvili’s painting, this connection is particularly evident: as in a fresco, his images seem not so much to be depicted as to appear out of space and light.

Bachanashvili was born in the village of Lechuri in the Telavi district and studied at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts under Giorgi Jashi and Ucha Japaridze. From the realist school, he inherited an attentiveness to light and composition, yet developed his own philosophical language. “I love life and strive to look at it with bright eyes every day — so that the soul does not fade or grow old, so that a person remains human,” the artist says.

In 1991, Bachanashvili was invited to an artist residency in Tacoma, Tbilisi’s sister city in the United States, where his first exhibition abroad took place. In spring 2022, the National Gallery of Georgia hosted his exhibition “White Circle”, bringing together around 70 works from his mature period. “Mysterious Mystery” belongs to this period. The artist’s works are also represented in the permanent exhibition of the Georgian Museum of Fine Arts in Tbilisi.