Modelling of postmodern urban space in contemporary Georgian painting

Abstract

The postmodern paradigm of urban space marked with privilege of unreal over real space creates visual model characterized by multilayer and complex structure incorporating both real and unreal spaces. The dominant in such spatial model is not built structure but the very space where social interactions, networks and activities take place. The disintegration of the city into virtual space gives birth to completely different spatial perception where common postmodern tendencies are observed. Central among these tendencies is the fading of physical body of the city and strengthening of imagination.

Levan Laghidze‟s painting style and his working process offers well thought concept of postmodern paradigm where objective enviornment of the city gives up its importance and moves to the human mental space where it is loaded with personal perception of individual. Thus, wiith urban fragments the viewer as a subject creates new, personally interpreted city image. L. Laghidze‟s art is an open text and just like literature texts are proposed for open interpretation.

The reading of verbal or visual text is the practice of life itself. However, it could be transformed into interpretational reality only in case if author is able to provide relevant circumstances for reading and in the process of the reading - now and here.

The common problem for modern era is the problem of communication with a viewer. To be able to read all the information of the city the viewer needs to be armed by certain conventions and information. Without them - without a communication language - it‟s impossible for individual to establish communication with permanently changeable space of he city.

Freedom of constructing the space granted by the artist gives chance to a viewer to practice multiple possibilities of permanently widening meanings of visual image and places him in the mode of play. This method of cooperation between the artist and a viewer creates complex textual layer. In this process the viewer is a creator of a new space while the artist could be seen as a stimulant of the game. On the crossing of their interactions the complex and multilayer dimension – the postmodern spatial image - is created.