MANIFEST “Renaissance of Beauty” by Alexandre Beridze
I, Alexander Beridze, a visioner painter, declare a new Era in Art. I declare the return of beauty. The beauty we knew since antiquity and until the era of postmodernism, the beauty admired by generations of artistic geniuses, the beauty of frame, gesture, composition, colour, and shape – all that we see in the detail and nuance of artistic creation.
One of the most famous postmodern protagonists, Marcel Duchamp, predicted the return of painting to its dominant place in 100 years. But he challenged society, all the laws of beauty and true art, presenting the urinal as a work of art. So did his associates and successors of his ideas come up with conceptual art? But beauty does not need a concept, a summary, or an explanation. For centuries, people have been able to see the true beauty and admire the masterpieces without explaining the concept of the work. Not a single person felt like a fool in front of a masterpiece because the true divine beauty itself clearly speaks to the viewer.
Today, more than ever, questions have arisen: which way of development will mankind follow? How will culture and art evolve? To answer these questions, first of all, we must leave in the past the era of the hated postmodern, which led us to a deplorable result. It was an era built on the denial of beauty. On the idea that is still hovering in the circles of «experts» and critics of art: painting is dead, over, and everything that could be done has already been drawn.
The postmodern era is characterized by the separation of the artist-creator and his work. In the language of theorists, everything is an art, and anyone can be an artist. This means that the real author is dead, and a personal style is impossible and unnecessary. There is nothing new, everything has already been done, and everything is a repetition (remix) or irony at best.
To answer the questions posed at the beginning, it is necessary to understand the significance of the painting. Not only in the history of art but also in the history of mankind! Painting is the only tool to chronologically «write» the history of our presence on Earth. The most effective way to display the evolution of humanity. Starting with rock paintings and ending with modern masterpieces. And all because painting does not need a translation, and it is understandable in all languages.
What happened? Why did we stop believing in art? I will answer. Art has become a commodity for the sake of the market. Everything became art, but art did not become everything! Today, any craftsman has been elevated to the rank of an artist. There is disharmony, an imbalance between the material and the spiritual. People have forgotten that they came to this Earth to become more spiritual. We live in an era of value substitution, where all guidelines and basic concepts of previous eras about beauty have been swept away. Beauty is infinite, just like our universe! Beauty, our vision of beauty and its understanding, is the highest good granted to a man from above. Only art – true art – can help a person rise, grow and become more spiritual, get closer to his creator.
The artist is not separable from his creation for the simple reason that he embeds a part of himself, of his soul, in his creation. This is what makes it last, what gives joy to the eye and the soul of many a spectator. It’s time to shift the paradigm, to declare Renaissance, once again, as has been done before. After all, everything in our world follows Hegel’s dialectical spiral: the patterns are repeated at every new level.
Let me remind you that we are talking about fine art – or «beaux arts» in French or «belle arti» in Italian.
Fine, beaux, belle – it is all about beauty. I propose to return to this primal meaning of art, to true beauty being the creators’ landmark and the guide.
«The beauty will save the world» wrote Dostoevsky. But who will save beauty? It is on us. It’s time to declare a new era in art, the era of the return of beauty, and that will also prompt societal change. This is a call to everyone who agrees with me to join this manifesto. Artists and creators of the world, let celestial beauty be our guide. As we are writing the history of humanity, let us get together to write the most beautiful chapter in this story.
Alexandre Beridze was born in Saint Petersburg in 1975. Grandson of a Russian artist painter Fedor Kholenkov, and when Alexandre was four, he asked his grandfather to draw planes and tanks for him but his grandfather didn’t want to go back to his memories of a soldier in the World War II, and instead taught his grandson the basics of drawing so he could draw for himself. Ever since, becoming passionate about drawing and painting, he graduated from Tbilisi Academy of Fine Arts. In 2000 Alexandre moved to France.
Since 2005 Alexandre Beridze has been conducting regular exhibitions. The most notable was the personal exhibition at the Adler Gallery in Paris in 2011, after which, Bertrand Saint Vincent, the Editor-In-Chief of the famous French newspaper “Le Figaro” wrote an article on the front page on March 8, 2011. The same year – Beridze participated with the Adler Gallery in the Art Paris Fair and was mentioned by the Journal du Net among 10 most promising artists in France. In 2014, Beridze participated in Florence Biennale, where he was awarded the Sandro Botticelli prize honoring the distinguished contemporary artists. Multiple personal exhibitions followed in Paris, Monaco, Nice and Brussels.
Alexandre Beridze works in the style of Expressive Abstraction.
The art critics noted the rich color palette of Alexandre’s work, his ability to experiment with colors, different techniques and graphic images. In 2010, the artist formulated for himself his own art theory – “Lines of color” claiming that everything around us consists of color fragments and lines, which together form one picture. In 2012, Alexandre Beridze started to enrich the Color Lines Series by adding a content in a form of segments in between the lines what he called Intersections. Alexandre recalls his childhood, when he enjoyed looking at the changing view through a window of a moving train. “We are surrounded by the segments of images, a succession of shots forming a whole” says Beridze.
Since 2013 Alexandre’s artworks are sold at Philipps auction in London and New York, the leading auction house for contemporary art.
The Sacred Geometry, often described as the origin of all forms, is Beridze’s important source of inspiration. It is said that every natural pattern of growth or movement comes back to one or more geometric shapes. The molecules of our DNA, the cornea of our eye, snowflakes, flower petals, crystals, a shell, the stars, the galaxy we spiral within, the air we breathe, and all life forms are created out of geometric codes.
This is why, in 2014 Alexandre Beridze started to incorporate the geometric figures into his work to express his visualization of the world by color fragments and lines, segments of images and the geometry. Scientists link this series of works to our memory.
In 2016, Beridze began the series of work entitled “Reflection” and was noticed by a group of French and Russian scientists, mentalists, neuroscientists and philosophers according to whom Alexandre is the first artist to visualize and draw the thought process. “What has always seemed to be the property of philosophy alone – the reflection, the attention, the subconscious, the impulse of life – became available to vision thanks to Beridze’s art” – say the scientists. Alexander Beridze is part of his latest series, “Reflection”. Reflection happens non-verbally in our consciousness and abstract art is an extraordinary way to represent this complex process on canvas. The painter visualizes the movement of each thought which, according to scientists, never moves in a straight line but by the spontaneous chaotic flow.The artist draws an analogy between the complex system of structuring information in blocks forming the chain of data-blockchain and the flow of thoughts, images and perceptions that arise in our mind, creating the blockchain of our memory. Alexandre Beridze expresses his feelings through painting ,what others express through writing; it is an immediate impression, rather than concepts and theories. This is why we can qualify him as an impressionist figurative painter, or even a cartographer, of our mind. Beridze’s art inspired the scientists to numerous essays and studies of his work, such as “Figurative mental – the art of Alexandre Beridze”, by French mentalist Jean-Louis Tripon. Alexander Poustovit, Doctor of Philosophy from Kiev, described Beridze’s art in his study, “Alexandre Beridze – Portrait of a thought”. Jean-Louis Tripon and Beridze published a book “Discovering our mental life” – “A la découverte de notre vie mentale”, that was presented in the book salon in Paris in 2018.
In 2021 Alexander received the title of Honored Artist of Europe from the Hanover Academy of Natural History for his services in the field of connection between science and art.
Alexandre is a member of the National Monegasque Committee of the International Association of Plastic Arts with U.N.E.S.C.O.
The paintings are available in Cannes and Paris Vieceli Gallery.
Cannes: 111&122 rue Antibes Paris: 5 rue De Pas de la Mule.