Biba Kayewich

Biba Kayewich

1-13

Through a glass, darkly

… but then: face to face

In the history of fine arts, achievements and experiences have been known in which one author creates a work inspired by the works of another author. Sometimes it represents an expression of respect toward a certain author, and sometimes it is a creative reaction initiated by the work. In that manner, a new relationship is being actualized, a creative play that opens a new reading and a new interpretation in relation to the “already recognizable and established elements” with respect to the author or the inspiring work.

In the context of the artist Biba Kayewich, the inspiration is based on one of the greatest names in European and world culture, cinematography and theatre, Ingmar Bergman  (1918-2007). The works of this Swedish film and theatre director and screenwriter, author of some of the most significant achievements in the history of film art, for Kayewich represent a real inspiration trigger for the complex work titled “1-13 Through a glass, darkly “. More specifically, in her work she dedicates herself analytically and focused to certain segments of the film “Through A Glass Darkly“, created in 1961 for which Bergman in 1962 received an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. The title has been taken from the Bible, from “Hymn to Love” (The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians): “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face…” The story of the film is delicate, layered and emotional. It takes place during 24 hours period in a carefully built situation of the small, isolated Swedish island of Fårö. In the center of the film is Karin, a young woman who suffers from hallucinations and hysteria, and comes to the island on vacation with her husband, a doctor who can not help her with her condition, her younger brother, an adolescent who can not cope with his sexual immaturity and emotional problems, and her father, a writer estranged from his children because of his obsession with himself and his novels (autoreferential figure of Bergman himself). As an additional “character” in the film, the whole time surrounding the protagonists, there is the fascinating white, eerie light that shapes them till the end.

Inspired by this chamber film in three acts, where every member of the family is a mirror for the others, Kayewich has succeeded in creating one highly ambitious composition consisting of several series of paintings and drawings, expressing exhaustive psychological aesthetics of dramatic effect, intimate clutching between the mental and the material, parallelisms, retrospections, repetitions, hallucinations, phases of tranquility… These group contents can also function by themselves, as completely separated segments independent from each other. This is why the whole concept of the exhibition acts as a combination of more exhibitions on the same subject.

The close-up shot is an essential subject in the film, and that, for a meditative and focused author like Kayewich, represents a true artistic value for powerful absorption of Karin’s character as a refined reflection of the mental state in combination with the mysterious lighting and the painful, expressive intensity of the gaze. Using grey shades, the cold register of colors and shadows, she creates sensitive portraits, that in their subjective sequences reach different levels of intimacy, self-examination…

On the other side, because of the visual possibility that every shot in the film is seen as a separate and frozen photograph, and from every shot to be created a photographic mise-en-scène, Kayewich creates a massive series of single shots and fragments from the film, produced digitally and in combination with pen and ink. The whole series, in drawing and atmospheric sense, “reflects” very impressively the mute aesthetic reality of the film. She creates shots filled with “God’s silence”, that with their austere surroundings and austere colors of visualization, poetically fit into Bergman’s idea of language and dialogic “torment” as “hostile element” of film art. In this series, the main characters coexist in alienated and “cold” dramatic manner, crushed between their identities and the sense of life, in the border areas between reality and illusion, the attitude towards death, faith and love, and most importantly, their impossible interpersonal communication. A particular effect is created with the shots where Karin begins to believe that God is coming in the shape of a spider through the absurd pattern of the wallpaper on the cracked wall in the attic, and that she would be able to enter into another world through the same wall.

Here we also have to emphasize those works/variations from Kayewich, where the film  establishes the sea as one of the permanent frames of Berman’s ambient. In these quiet and unobtrusive achievements, one can feel the associative development of Karin’s mental and somewhat mystic condition, the despair and the alienation of the lonely protagonists. In the film Bergman uses the spider as a metaphor for God. This “characterization” of God as a spider in the difficult schizophrenic moments of Karin, was realized by Kayewich in a series of drawings filled with intertwined fractal “spider” structures, interpreting a visualization of her hallucinations about God’s appearance on this side of reality. At the same time, these drawings made over a long period of time and long moments of silence guide the viewer through a vertiginous labyrinth of themes, scenes and associations that appear and change whenever they have been looked at in a different manner… The metaphor about the spider web and the intertwinement is in a close relation with her long, detailed and delicate treatment of the painting and drawing surface.

The whole exhibition represents a sensitive layered geography of the soul where the forces of Good and Evil, Faith and Doubt, Theophany and Madness, Man and Woman, Childhood and Old Age, Parent and Alienation, Traumas and Obsessions, Impulsiveness and Certain Resignation, as well as the painful space between God’s Grace and God’s Absence all converge. One disturbingly painful denuding.

As a matter of fact, regardless of what thematic, inspirational or subject matter representation/idea it is about, Kayewich, as an author, stays conistently focused in the poetic and chamber-like solution of the visual collage emotions through a meticulous drawing gesticulation, drawing softness and detailed precision.