TOUCHING THE MOMENT

Brush Strokes. This is the title of American artist Jacob Martin’s exhibition recently held in the Art Villa Gallery. It was initiated by a non-government organisation Arts Council Azerbaijan and supported by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Azerbaijan. The selection of pictures mainly included portraits, several landscapes and animalistic works created by the artist during his one-year stay in Azerbaijan. The colour palette contains calm tones. With wide confident strokes, Martin depicts hard uncompromising relationship with the world. He does not use half tones and filigree approach for drawing the objects, as he needs neither. The rigid manner of conveying one's own vision and sensation depicts a realistic view of the subject of his artistic research. It is this stylistic approach and technique that lead to the conclusion that Strokes in the name of the exposition is actually a blow, but not a touch or a sway.

Portraits

Faces… everywhere... Males and females... Young and older... The most noteworthy thing about them are the eyes: either wide or quietly focused on something of their own. But there is life, the accumulated experience of emotional shocks, experiences, a difficult relationship with the world in these eyes. These relations are different. Here is a woman at the table with a glass full of a light drink in front of her. It looks like a beer, or any other soft drink. She is calm and focused on something: her head is half turned; her gaze is fixed on something or someone who is obviously dear to her. She is almost pacified. Involuntarily, this picture should remind you Degas’s Absinthe, Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe, Van Gogh’s Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin, Albert Bertrand The Absinthe Drinker, Édouard Manet’s The Plum. The characters of these authors are caught in a moment of uneasy emotional relations with the world. But Jacob Martin’s character seems to have a friendly relation with the world surrounding her, perhaps even a harmonious one. One can see her face in another work of the artist, where she looks at us holding a plastic cup in her left hand. The woman does not look at us but through us concentrated on her thoughts. And here is a man at the table in a blue free T-shirt. He is neither old nor young. There is a glass with a drink on the table. We see him in a moment of heated argument with his opponent whom we cannot see. Actively gesticulating, the man is trying to convince his interlocutor in his own right. What is their dispute, and perhaps the dispute with us? About the undeniable truths? About a new morality? The overthrow of ideals? We will never know. But this is not really so important. It is important only that life - today, here and now - does not make the man indifferent to it while his face is telling us a different story. We see a question in his eyes covering almost the half of his face: Why? What was wrong with this person's life? Why cannot his emotional state be called peaceful? He painfully searches for an answer as if forcing us to join him in his quest.

A man and his world. That is the first associative name for the picture that comes to one’s mind, if not for his close, studying view of the essence of the human problem. If one can call the process of relations with the world a problem. Each character in these portraits has his own way in search of harmony, his difficulties and questions. But they are all people with a living soul: thinking, suffering, trying to unravel the meaning of their destiny...

Animalism

This genre is represented by two drawings only: a cow with a bell and the sheep. It seems there is nothing special with them. The cow is wandering on the stubble chewing up the cut wheat stalks. But lo! There is a clear blue sky and green hills in the background along the horizon! What a pacifying and peaceful environment around it! What a harmony! This world is more perfect than the human one... Here is a herd of sheep. We cannot see a shepherd but a purposeful movement of the sheep toward their goal. And by the end of the day, when the sun sets, the goal is to return home. There is a few sheep on the large foreground. One cannot stop but look at them gaining a sense of reality, and understands that happiness, apparently, is not in vanity but in the dimension and orderliness of life.

Landscape

Almost a fantastic story on the canvas, where a stone structure is depicted against the background of a sandy mountain. At the foot of it is a quiet surface of blue water. The Mother Nature peacefully joins the past with the present turning it into an instance of time! There are no contradictions here. Only peace, silence, and harmony. It seems that it is precisely the search for earthly harmony that concerns the artist. At least, one can come to such a conclusion getting know the works drawn over the past year. The world of people, the world of animals, the world of nature. Something on the way to civilizational benefits is lost in the organic connection between them. The animal world has remained a part of nature; therefore, it does not lack a harmonious beginning. A man in pursuit of technologies that bring the benefits of civilization has lost his harmonious connection with the nature and is now in the eternal search for himself, harmony, meaning of life...