My Grandmother's Polar Bear immediately catches the eye. Its meticulous, realistic technique has us believing the veracity of the image even as we know the sight of a gray-haired woman nonchalantly leading a humongous polar bear on a leash past an ancient stone wall is nonsensical. "I'm giving viewers something to look at, drawing them in and seducing them," Archil Pichkhadze says of his dreamlike imagery. Yet in these unstable, anxious times, his surrealistic paintings take on a sense of portent, of ominous foretelling. "Twenty years ago, the idea of combining an Italian hill town and an animal from the Arctic might have seemed odd," he says, noting that the painting dates from 2004. But given the warming climate, "perhaps those worlds will converge. You can imagine a future in which someone living in the Mediterranean does have a polar bear as a pet."
Pichkhadze's images are culled from his photographs and recombined in scenes in which something is amiss: In the panorama-like crowded Californian beach scene of Mariposa Beach, for example, a girl playing in the sand is inexplicably sprouting wings, while the grim, windowless tower rising in the background at the lefthand edge of the panel is at odds with the carefree beachgoers. "The joke is that it's closed in, like a penal colony," the artist says, noting he never literally spells out a narrative but simply suggests. The warm gray light that suffuses his beaches, fields, lawns, and rooms is charged with a sense of expectancy, of time unfolding and anticipation of the future seamlessly woven into the fabric of memory.
A retrospective of Pichkhadze's work at Kingston's Lace Mill Gallery in January and February included his portraits, still lifes, wood assemblages and photographs, showcasing not only his capacity for invention but also his exquisite craft. Pichkhadze is a master at capturing the specific tone and hue of the multitudinous shapes that comprise his beautifully drawn, faceted forms. He excels at portraying light in all its nuances, which lends a mystical character to his narratives. He lures us into the illusion, even as the painting plainly reveals itself as a scaffolding of colored shapes, patches of delicately toned hues that in some works are left rough along the bottom edge. The ultimate mystery is this dichotomy of the illusory and abstract within the painting itself.
It's tempting to attribute his sense of fatalism, his images of abandoned buildings, isolated human figures, and stark, vast spaces, to his early years growing up in the Soviet Union. But, in fact, Pichkhadze has pleasant memories of the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, where he was born in 1968. When he was 11, his family immigrated to the US, settling in Queens. He earned a BFA in illustration from the School of Visual Arts and obtained his MFA from Brooklyn College, where he studied painting with Lennart Anderson. "He taught me how to look closely at what I'm seeing and to get yourself out of it," says Pichkhadze. "The world is more interesting than you are."
Based in Park Slope with his wife, Sara DeAngelis, a museum exhibition planner, and young son, Pichkhadze did illustration work and graphic production while showing his paintings at New York galleries. In 2008, the family moved to San Jose, where he painted his first large narrative works. They left California in 2015 and bought a house outside New Paltz with a stunning view of the Shawangunk Ridge, where he paints in a barn-like shed on the property.
"I love looking at art and even find the AI thing interesting," Pichkhadze says. "Now that there's a nonhuman entity that can actually make images that are well done and completely believable, I don't have to work anymore and can retire," he adds facetiously.
