PAULIS LIEPA
Paulis Liepa is a artist, printmaker and animator based in Riga, Latvia.
Statement:
Along with their common technique, all the prints share a sense of 1970's aesthetics, which manifests itself, for example, in furniture from the era, or -more pronouncedly - in the choice of colours and their combinations: mostly various ocher and mustard tonalities. Perhaps that can be interpreted as nostalgia for the marvels of consumer goods and colourful packaging by a child who grew up under the conditions of Soviet scarcity. Virtually every work also shares a confrontation between two- and three dimensional impressions, dragging the viewer unwittingly towards exploring his or her perception.
For more than a decade Paulis Liepa has resolutely kept to these crystallized series and motifs, as if reaffirming the drive towards system and order, represented in his works. Despite their apparent transparency, analyzable, almost exact structure, the meaning of his prints remains paradoxically obscure. Tearing apart and dissection does not necessarily yield more clarity, rather the process shows the uncontrollable human striving to order the world. One could - if required - label the artist a "conceptual formalist" with a tendency towards simplicity and enigma, but that would represent just one vertex from which to look at Paulis Liepa's works.
(Paulis Liepa- An Artist in Binary Opposition by Sniedze Sofia Kale)
