Elene Shatberashvili: Crimson

Returning to Angles-sur-l’Anglin a year after she was in residency there with Villa Atrata, Georgian painter Elene Shatberashvili presents Crimson , an exhibition of new paintings and drawings as well as a sound installation designed specifically for the Villa Atrata exhibition space, Chapel Sainte Croix. Named for the Holy Cross, the True Cross of Christ’s crucifixion, the interior plaster walls of this desecralized structure bloom pale pink. The site is what remains of the nave of an once larger church, part of the 11th century Abbey of Sainte Croix, destroyed during the French Wars of Religion.

Preparing for this exhibition, Elene also explored another local historic site that links to her ongoing fascination with the enigmatic form of the cave. More than ten thousand years before the Bishop of Poitiers erected Abbey Sainte Croix, a Magdalenian community made their home on the banks of the Anglin. Stone tools, beaded jewelry and low relief wall carvings inside limestone caves, the so-called Roc-aux-Sorciers, testify to a complex prehistoric civilization. In the mid 20th century, a trio of Europe’s very first female archaeologists discovered a depiction of three female nudes in the chalky caverns shaped by the river’s flow. Headless, these unique figures are distinguished by their round bellies, curved hips and soft clefts. Like primitive icons, their forms would have shimmered in firelight as portals for reproduction, pleasure and life, colored in a lunar cycle of bleeding.

For Paintings and Drawings, last fall at Villa Atrata, Palais Royale, Shatberashvili introduced the motif and deep crimson of the poppy flower. At Chapel Sainte Croix, she fully devotes herself to the color red. Religious iconography consistently at the heart of her work, Shatberashvili explores the fluidity between figurative and abstract, a painterly expansion from the real to the beyond. Symbol of drowsiness, death, and relic of the Passion of Christ, the poppy’s delicate petals and stem return here in Shatberashvili’s immense, astral landscapes. In oil on canvas, the artist’s liquid finish and river of sinuous brushstrokes shape her compositions’ depths, possibilities for refuge and form. The spheres that emerge in these canvases evoke both the force of the full moon and the timeless mystery of the human skull. It is important to note as well that in traditional depictions of the Holy Cross, raised on Mount Golgotha, a skull remains at its base, signaling transition to the ambiguous realms of death and dream. Shatberashvili’s painting echoes the iconic composition, as well as this site’s layered history and a local rumor. Though no evidence has been found, some say a saint lies buried beneath the floor of this chapel.

Though she has long studied Byzantine icon painting, this summer, for the first time, Shatberashvili shows her work in the technique. Her icons now on view at Pompidou Metz for the Louvre exhibition Copyists, here, at the chapel, her work in tempera on wood invokes the seven sleepers of Ephesus. According to Christian legend, in the third century, seven youths, persecuted by the Roman emperor for their faith in Christ, hid inside a cave near the Mediterranean shore. In damp darkness, they fell asleep, waking two centuries later in a sort of miraculous resurrection. “The image really stayed with me,” Shatberashvili says. The cave is a constant enigma in her work.

As if to activate the steeple bell, now silenced on the chapel’s stone floor, Shatberashvili bathes this high ceilinged, practically cavernous space, with her recording of cow bells from a mountainside in Georgia. Evoking, in one stroke, the Nativity and a resonating call to prayer, Shatberashvili’s sound work creates an immersive environment that recalls a very specific place: her family’s native Imereti region and their village, Svari, meaning vineyard. Wine country, still producing the burgundy liquid that symbolizes, transubstantiates, some believe, into Christ’s blood.

Like religion, art relates to belief. One might imagine that visitors to this sweeping stone space, filled with Shatberashvili’s works on wood, canvas and paper, follow in the footsteps of Ephesus’s holy septet. There are times when entering an artist’s exhibition means escaping the suffering outside. And there are moments too, when one stays, suspended, by faith, as if for an eternity, or nearly.