From 14 September Gallery “Rāmis” will show the exhibition “Klusuma tuvošanās”, the latest works of the painter Māris Upzars.
In the works on show the artist invites us to feel and to think about the phenomenon of silence and its part in bringing a person's inner world into harmony.
The painter Māris Upzars thinks that in our anxious and uncertain time many people long for peace, for order and for silence. He needs it himself, and he has long been looking for a way to reach it. One of the insights these searches have yielded suggests looking for peace and silence in one's own inner world.
The painter offers a silence to be felt that is large, warm, dark and mysterious. Sounds and thoughts are slowly born in it, but human consciousness cannot yet light it up.
Just as the presence of black in a painting helps us to see colour in it, so the silence between sounds lets us perceive their beauty and depth.
Māris Upzars thinks that sounds and thoughts of consequence come about only in silence.
It seems to him that this ought to be a silence in people's thoughts and consciousness. If a person's inner world is filled with information of every kind competing for attention, it is impossible to go deeply into the solving of any important question. So the artist thinks that people are called to clear their consciousness of an overabundance of impressions and to give themselves to an ascetic purity of thought, which can reveal to each person their own colourful and manifold nature.
About the artist
Māris Upzars
Māris Upzars is a painter of the middle generation who has worked consistently in abstract painting for many years. He holds that painting is one of the ways of searching for Truth, and that the language of colour is fit for speaking in it about the mysteries of human existence. Māris is convinced that the absence of recognisable visual motifs or objects in a painting has to be made up for by content that is particularly deeply lived, thought through and felt. Perhaps that is why his works can be called autobiographical.