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Passer by

Recurring motifs inhabit Basilaia’s figurative oeuvre: various animals, and many passers-by, silhouettes of men walking hurryingly, from right to left, from left to right like puppets. They are first sketched in ink then given relief with color and newspaper collages. Who are they? Where are they going? It is not known, but they look determined. As if caught in flight, these walkers, who are often feminine figures, pass each other, or march forward together, like a choreographed urban ballet. Some solitary figures bring about memories of long gone troubadour or pilgrims on a journey across Europe.

Georgian Mythology

Folklore and tales of Basilaia’s native Georgia are never far away neither is the “Vie de Bohème” of his childhood. Treated with tenderness and a touch of irony, are red wigged clowns or  a musician brandishing a violin or blowing in a horn. In the series, Stalinland photographed symbols and icons of the Soviet culture are confronted and paired with libertine characters and excesses from the Occidental society, in anachronous collages. Although his technique of photo-collage place Basilaia in the linage of such neo-realists as Mimmo Rotella, Raymond Hains, or Jacques de la Villeglé his poetic universe is closer to that of Chagall, whose oeuvre he admires.

Fleeing tale

Basilaia’s works reflect the patchwork of life where events, loved ones, and situations compose an improbable collage. That life is not static, even his windmill seems to be fleeing, already halfway in the air. Some of his itinerants are made up of chunks of maps, as if to stress their universal identity, maybe an expression of the multitude of displaced human beings in our modern society. Some of them glance at us furtively, yet with insistence, as if they wanted to tell their life-long journey in this brief instant.