Nika Kutateladze: Acacia Bloom

Nika Kutateladze’s ›Acacia Bloom‹ loosely tells the story of the myopic focus on fences of a handful of men who remain in a depopulated village amidst an impending—or really ongoing—landslide. Kutateladze spent five years living alongside these holdouts and the largely abandoned, ramshackle houses that populate the staggering beauty of the mountainous landscape.

Kutateladze was initially compelled to start painting because of his impression that in this depopulated village any sense of exteriority eroded to reveal a base human nature. As such, his paintings begin as portraits of these holdouts, evolving until a deeper or more instinctual form of recognition materializes. Indeed as his own painterly project has developed over the past six years—he studied architecture, then worked primarily in sculpture and installation before starting to paint in 2020—he has continued to probe the possibilities of how to strip back the surface of a face. He approximates such porosity in his portraits as orifices hollow into a ghostly pallor and contours fracture or dissolve. The jackals that recur throughout this group of paintings also bare their teeth in another gesture of literally exposed interiority. Kutateladze’s work stands in a lineage of portraiture concerned with a dark vision of life and is reminiscent, at moments, of Francis Bacon’s concern with “the whole horror of life, of one thing living off another” or Marlene Dumas’s ethereal takes on everyday monstrosities. Indeed painting is an apt medium for such a concern with a permeable surface, while working on board accentuates an emphasis on removal, as it allows Kutateladze to build up and then work away at layers of oil.

Kutateladze’s observations of this village has a tinge of a Sartrian ›No Exit‹—L'enfer, c'est les autres—as well as of the tradition of fictionalized rural towns in the vein of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s Macondo or William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. When you understand this place, you know everything you need to know. It’s as if to say, on some level, this is all there is. On the other hand, like these novels, Kutateladze’s paintings, and the installation that houses them, operate with a sociopolitical specificity, as his observation of the Guria mountains in his native Georgia also speak to the region’s migration patterns and borderization.

In the gallery’s basement, two fences stand in a face-off echoed by the portraits hung above them, which seem to just avoid each others’ gaze. Integrating his paintings into these vaguely threatening remnants of a home, Kutateladze points to the strange symbiosis that develops between inhabitants and their lived environment. The installation also alludes to a circular logic embodied by the Acacia wood fences in the village, as acacia trees are often grown simply to provide the wood to build a fence around the plot of trees themselves. This cycle grows only more senseless and relentless as the mountainside itself slowly erodes in landslides. And on and on and on.