Viewing the past as a spiral of infinite reoccurrence, Andro Wekua creates enigmatic tableaux questioning the intersections of history, memory, and fantasy. In the new paintings and collages included in this book, Wekua explores history as a chain of repeating events and emotions, that both heightens a sense of disassociation even as it sustains one's inner-life.
Many elements of Wekua's formal language reappear throughout the various media he employs. Images that could be family snapshots or advertisements haunt the base layers of his collages as the artist's hand drowns them in color, traces attenuated facial features, and obliterates the composition with interlocking geometric shapes. The question lingers whether what is buried is lost, or purposefully hidden. Out of these collages emerge not just recurring images but also the basic formal grammar of Wekua's visual world.
Working in a diverse array of media, Andro Wekua (born 1977 in Sukhumi, Georgia, lives and works in Switzerland) has developed a visual language grounded in the exploration of human experience through the subtle intersections of individual and pooled memory, personal identity, and history. Drawing on genres such as fantasy, science-fiction, and horror, Wekua creates fantastical and often macabre tableaux, revealing the complex processes of reconstruction and fragmentation that continually inform the personal, social, and fictive experience of remembrance.
Creating pictorial representations of the past to better comprehend and grapple with the present, Wekua meditates on the tenuous boundary between historical reality and the artificial construct of remembering, pointing to the inescapable fact that the past is always distorted by the subjectivity of memory.
