"THE FIBRES OF BAKU"

When you live in one and the same place for a very long time, you stop noticing the beauty of the streets, houses and people around you. You quickly become accustomed to the scenery surrounding you, and it becomes so familiar that the special features of it stop being noticeable against the general backdrop of certain seasons of the year. Therefore a stranger's view of this world, which has been surrounding you since childhood, a view that is not soft-soaped or biased, is always interesting. The Italian artist Paola Anziche from Milan, who has visited Azerbaijan, experienced her own sensations and artistic images when perceiving a space that was unfamiliar to her. Baku's architecture, the traditional folk handicrafts cast this image of the peculiarities of ethnicity and mind-set, which she shared with her viewers at the exhibition called "The Fibres of Baku".

What are these fibres? Are they simply the result of man's handicraft activity? No, not at all. This concept is much broader and deeper. These fibres are not invisible, intellectual attachments, which impart the idea of a mutual cultural integration between the arts of the two peoples. Her works are not manifested with the brushstrokes customarily found on canvas. The texture of the material that is used by the artist is woollen threads, silk ribbons, wool and home-woven fabric. From all this, a sensation emerges of the image of the city, the country, the special features of the traditional way of life of a people that is unfamiliar to her.

And here from the home-woven kilims, from the silk ribbons and scraps of materials there emerge in the expanse of the exhibition hall compositions speaking of the indissoluble link between man and art, man and creativity, man and the structured materials with which he interacts. The kilim may be turned into a tower or become a component of the constructive daily interaction between man and the details of the domestic space. A sheepskin may create the sensation of warmth flowing through the body and by association evoke in our memories idyllic little pictures of alpine pastures, of shepherds wandering along at the back of the flock of sheep or mountain-dwellers trotting along on horseback…

"The Kilim"

Woven out of mutli-coloured strips, it obeys man's touch. This is an abundant material for plastic composition. Just look at it, doesn't it look like a person sitting? A person who is tired out by travelling and has sat down for a while to rest? Or, for example, it may be turned into some kind of covering like a hunter's cabin offering shelter from the burning sun and from the cold wind. Or suddenly it becomes a fluffy crinoline, part of a live composition with the texture of a live human face! Yes, the imagination is offered any amount of variants. The main thing is to want to see in a domestic item an inseparable part of man's everyday life, and not simply life, but a life of creativity. To create and invent things and try them out is a motto the Italian artist thinks,may become a goal for anyone who knows how to see life in tones that have not been forgotten.

"A warm world"

Sheep's wool wound into a ball, cocoons knitted from thick, home-spun woollen fibres, printed protuberances of unspecified form are quotes referring to the period of European quests (20th century) for ways to go beyond the limits of form, to invent particular stylistics in a series of metaphors and symbols. The departure from actual reality, the methods of taking apart what is most important in the structure, of man's contemporary problems and the transfer of the artist's main idea into a validated form of metaphor, is the favourite method of many people who regard their works as belonging to the conceptual art genre.

The artist uses warm natural material which creates different forms according to its volume. Going beyond the bounds of the traditional canvas, which is space-restricted, Paola Anziche turns the expanse of the room into a kind of 3D-format canvas. Therefore the composition can be viewed in different ways from various points in the exhibition hall. So, what can the artist who goes beyond the bounds of traditional form see? What can the artist tell people when departing from the canons of painting? First and foremost that the world around us cannot be flat, in the direct and indirect sense of that word. The world has volume. But that volume needs to be seen, felt and understood. And perhaps it opens up to you other dimensions and cosmic revelations. It will become closer and more understandable, and perhaps dearer and more intimate. It is no accident that a poet said that "when you look someone in the face, you don't see the face; you see much more from afar." Here we have taken a look into the inseparable link between the nature of things and man through the eyes of a stranger, the eyes of the Italian artist Paola Anziche.