No-Self in a Transparent Palace

Levan Songulashvili's work has always been suspended in a sort of liminal state of being. The depth of his research is indefinable and everything is intrinsically connected to another. At first glance the main feature of Songulashvili's works is their organicity — the colour strokes almost seem to be mixed with saliva, and one seems to see and feel the biological aspect of the work even if nothing organic is actually present in it.

This human aspect, animal, or even better, natural, further widens the artist's research field towards infinity, meaning that the work is full of both sensitivity and strength. The coexistence of these two aspects occurs because of the fragility of the organic being and its mutability as well as the power of nature and its internal rules. Rising from the organic, the work appears to be built upon a complex system of stratification.

Here the analysis of the emergence of individual identity, of consciousness, of the relationship between consciousness and unconscious, of the interrelation between multiple consciousnesses, of the cyclicity of life and the fluidity of being — constitute levels that are difficult to place in specific positions but rather merge into each other.

It is therefore an exceptional moment like that of a present distorted by an alarming pandemic in progress — that caused by COVID-19 — in which everything acquires a new light, or rather, the light begins to incorporate different angles that facilitate a more complete vision of aspects of individual and collective interest. The future today is even more vague and this state of affairs has led Songulashvili to the production of a series of works that offer an in-depth investigation of individual conscience, subjected in this period to significant moments of self-reflection.