WORLD IN QR

Despite his relatively young age, Sahib Yagubov’s is quite recognisable within his ‘personal circles’. He takes part in various trade exhibitions, is a winner of numerous local and international competitions held in Luxembourg, Brussels, Beijing, Paris, Dubai and Moscow. His works are in private collections in Russia, Belarus, Turkey, the USA and Canada. On June 4, the White Room, a one-month solo exhibition of this avant-garde artist, opened at Mincə Sənət Art Gallery. The exhibition features 30 works on various themes. This is Sahib's first solo exhibition, which has become a basis to start our conversation on the importance and significance of such a large format of presenting oneself to the public…

Sahib Yagubov (SY): “Every artist dreams of holding his own exhibition... When I studied at the academy, we have been repeatedly told that every preview is a primary version of an exhibition. During the training process we were taught to understand how to present our own works to the public. To use an analogy with cooking, it is like a dish: it must be both tasty and aesthetically beautiful. For me the first solo exhibition is like a wedding party, where I am the groom, the art of painting is my bride and the paintings are our children. But our relations have been officially registered after we gave birth to our numerous offspring. I love painting since my childhood! And now I can present to my people the outcome of my deep feelings. So you are welcome to visit my personal exhibition, get to know each other and discuss. It is the external emotions from our audiences that make artists live by their exhibitions, which are a concentration of both our and your emotions.

"One of the leading features in some of your works is your repeated reference to QR codes..."

"Our modern life is a QR code that gives information about a certain product. Any individual is a kind of energy product. In both the bad and the good sense of the term."

"Does it mean art succumbs to the QR code format as well?"

"I think this has always been true. Art tries to express itself in different ways, but it is impossible to completely separate from the existing world, to live and exist on our own. Art is always present in everyone's life. Are we aware of it? That is secondary, but it is an undeniable fact. That is why QR-coding has become intrinsic to art as well."

"There is a schematic pixelation in your works. Do you divide the world into squares?"

"I liked this visual motif. After all, painting is about colours, while sculpture is about forms arranged in some kind of space. And here they live in a state of balance. Here it's the colour or the stain that maintains this balance, that's what attracted me. You know, an idea comes like a wave that can catch several unconnected artists. That's how overlapping subjects and techniques are born. But at the same time each of them will let this wave through and the result will be extremely individual. When I saw the schematic of the QR code, I suddenly began to visually reinterpret it as looking through a window, transferring that trick to the canvas."

"So, there's no particular creative limitation..."

"I don't think so. It's up to artist's own choice. When you take a theme and start working on it, shall we assume it imposes restrictions on how we treat it? It's not a pure reproduction of a QR code. A creative person, just like anyone else, can see the entire world even in a QR grid. In fact, that the seeming limitation of QR code opens up incredible opportunities for us. For example my very first work in this style, Map of the World, was conceived with such a message in mind. Using this technique, I’ve only put on canvas the world I saw at that particular moment."

"But a moment spans a lifetime!"

"Sure thing! A moment is like a breath between life and death. There is a striking example in the Islamic culture: they whisper adhan to the ear of a newborn baby and perform a prayer, salah, when the person leaves this world for good. And note that the believers observe this sequence of adhan and salah every day. As to the philosophical aspect of this phenomenon, the life of a person is nothing but a moment between these two rituals."

"Does an artist decide to increase or expand the span between the two conditional points?"

"It can't be done! A moment will remain a moment forever. Can we measure it differently from the universal point of view? Don’t get delude yourself. It’s better to focus these efforts on living that moment as beautifully and rightly as possible. To live life as interestingly as possible, because we live only once! That's my credo. I remember another expression, which I can roughly translate as follows: a person lives two lives: the one before he realises that he has the only chance of life, and the one after this realisation. It is quite likely that I have just crossed the threshold of the second one. And I give myself a chance to live it so that I do not doubt if I had lived the right way. Then I decide on my next steps, including pondering over my new idea before making a decision so that I don’t blame myself later if something goes wrong. After all, it will be impossible to ‘re-write’ it, so to speak. I live once and will not be able to afford a second such moment."

"But an artist can make a mistake and paint something else on top of his painting..."

"Frankly, using the surface of a canvas only once requires high skills. It is sort of your childhood preserved and carried through the years. But if you constantly paint layers on top of each other, you can bury that feeling and one day realise the fact that it never existed. From the point of view of artistic philosophy, there is no difference whether you paint on canvas or cardboard to get the same result! Life is like creativity; it must have an aesthetic side too..."

"You have a variety of subjects in different styles hinting at the Absheron school of painting."

"The Absheron school in my works is because my teacher was the daughter of Vajdia Samedova and Latif Feyzullayev, two maestros of the Azerbaijani fine art. It would therefore be inevitably part of my personality. Plus, I was born in Absheron, and its spirit is certainly visible in my works. But it has been filtered through my own sensations. Because there are as many interpretations as the number of artists. It's the same with styles and subjects. You can imagine it as a point, a subject and a trajectory along which our life moves. As a result of this process, we get a final form, result. Even if they are similar in terms of materials used, there will be a difference. Perception is also important, of course. I am not in favour of following the only one. For me it's like going back to yesterday where there is no difference between then and today."

"Artist should create and experiment, shouldn’t he?"

"No other way! A creative person is simply obliged to seek new forms, sensations, narratives... It's part of his healthy sense of self. Perhaps returning to what has been tried and tested is a discipline. As my teacher, People's Artist Fuad Salayev, used to say ‘Repeated actions make perfection, but not in case of art’. Now I understood how right he was. And getting back to the artist's right to make a mistake, one cannot rule out the moment when a mistake may have something interesting in its subtext. There is a thin line between not being aware of what has been done and a deliberate act with a different energy content. I can think of something at one moment, but who knows what my thoughts will be like in ten years... After all, if you accept the linearity of development, any verticality that we build may one day fall apart, making that linearity lose some part of it. And after a while, when you rethink something, you realise that it was redundant, and the picture gets a true coherence."

"You started your training as a painter but continued as a sculptor. Are you searching for something?"

"Painting and sculpture have different languages of communication, a different subject approach. What can be incredibly interesting in sculpture will be reversed in painting. It is like two languages, one reflecting more the artistic-philosophical aspect of the concepts, while the other is more focused on its information content. On top of that, it is always important to take into account the specifics of translation. Using the same allegory, when referring to a painting or sculpture, in an attempt to understand and comprehend the author's message or why a particular form of presentation was chosen for the theme, it is worth taking the subtle pictorial nuances into account."

"Your works vary in their amplitude from abstraction to classical forms."

"I'll be honest. Sometimes, as I approach my easel, I realise that I don't have anything thematically defined in my thoughts. There are certainly plans I follow. But there are times when I can't make something happen. I cannot work mechanically but I have to practice anyway. Or I fill in my time with creative research trying something new, different from what I usually do. Who knows what might come in handy in the future? So different works are born from each other."

"Expressing your thoughts through creativity?"

"When I work on a painting or a sculpture, I don't think about whether I'm expressing myself in it. It's not my rule. At the same time, I leave my own vision to everyone around me. After all, every thought is a product multiple factors that come together at that particular moment in life of an individual. There is no absolute for everyone! Something can be good for someone and the same thing will become bad for another."

"Do you believe in destiny? Predetermination?"

"Subconsciously yes, maybe. It has to be. Regardless of my intention to live my life in the most interesting way possible, there is a kind of purpose in the life. Sort of spatial coordinates in which, let's say, two points are born. And no matter how they move from being parallel to intersection, there is no perfect resemblance between them. Each one is different in its own way. And there's some kind of predetermination in that, too. In physics, there is a concept of a strong dependence on initial (!) conditions. There is a potential that can be influenced by kinetic energy, but only the former determines the end result."

"Physics in relation to art?"

"Physics is an art itself. So is mathematics, my favourite subject during my training. I can tell you that people who think of it in the context of numbers alone are sorely mistaken. It has a problem and certain standards. But you are free to solve the problem in your own way. The main thing is to get the answer right. The beginning and the end are the same for everyone, while the path may be different!"

"So, if we take a point as beginning, what’s at the end then?"

"Another point! Life itself is a line. As in the art."