Continuing the subject of pagan, folkloric legacies and otherworldly, semi-demonic imagery, I don’t think many artists do this as powerfully and poignantly as Nika Kutateladze. I was reminded of that the other day when I saw the documentation of his current Berlin solo show and an installation, Acacia Bloom, on view at Molitor.
Kutateladze initially caught my attention with pale, bruised, zombiesque figures gazing from the eerie, uncanny paintings on panel. Yet, as I saw more of his work, I noticed that same ambiance spilling beyond the small-scale formats. His interest in body horror transforms the archetypal portrait, a human figure, into a scene and a symbol. The skin, orifices, and anatomy become sites of horror, where mutation, decay, and the blurred boundary between human and non-human register larger, abrupt, and devastating societal dynamics.
Painted on panels, Kutateladze handles the paint roughly and aggressively, suggesting the importance of process over the finished result. The smears and scratches create a sense of ambiguous yet violent change from within, underlined by the work's scale, the darkness, and the chaotic cropping and framing. Appearing more as fragments, makeshift mementos of a painful experience, they contribute to the artist's effort to continuously document and understand the often perplexing, imminent societal changes.
A major part of his practice is documenting and examining dying villages and communities as a natural phenomenon. Looking beyond political or economic aspects, Kutateladze is interested in capturing these processes and the emotions they evoke. So, for this show, he built an installation using fences that a few remaining inhabitants of a mountainous village in his native Georgia built against landslides. The supposedly protective, even threatening appeal of the wooden barrage is compromised by the beams' rugged, unfit state. The scene's visible deterioration evokes fragility and temporality that seep into the surrounding, mutating portraits. By merging the existing architectural elements into a new space, Kutateladze blends the two realities and creates a new, impossible one. —Saša Bogojev
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