 A tree, always alive… It keeps memory… Little wooden house, which absorbed history, is now returning its zest. You just have to come through small door into narrow passage, look around and get imbued with warmth of the past life and warmth of the present.
And today this agreeable building houses gallery. Shazina gallery. Gallery of Shazina. Works, which Shazina Agrba falls in love with, are filling with light this bit of old Moscow. Subtlety and fineness of taste, delicacy in approach to artists, carefulness in motion to fine art. Not pathos but refinement.
I think those are main constituents of this little gallery life. Precisely here, like in a fairy-tale, will settle Shavkat’s works… For a while… Shot spell of exhibition…but it seems that this house and these works are created for each other. Because… in the beginning you perceive warmth, than light, after that you see colour, than you peer intently, and gradually a tangible joyous sorrow penetrates you… Yes, that feeling befalls as well sometimes.
You perceive painting at once, if you are not dull critic of fine art and lover of a long analytical work. You simply see and appreciate. Opinions are amusing and ridiculous, but anyway, everyone has right to his own perception. I only can see when I feel. If I do not feel, impossible to see. I have quite bizarre picture of world, I agree.
I had felt Shavkat before I came under the vaults of gallery, and just after that I started to see… Gazing at his weird world, strange because illuminated. If you are not living permanently in the world of his works, but getting in touch sometimes with their shining waves, you will see outlines of your own soul’s harmony…
But this is another world. It is organically different. Tonino Guerra formulated once precisely “world produces much more things than thoughts and consumption thwarts imagination”. Shavkat recreates an imagination; awakes it. He compels you to look intently at real- imaginative, which mostly might be forgotten.
It’s ridiculous to write “heroes of his works”, no heroes there, no works, not even fairy-tale. There is something unexplainable. Words are useless and when no words are there, what is left - only to dive into the flooded kindness…
Something you want to peer, without reckoning a meaning, to comprehend exception – from whence is THIS in a human? From whence is such tenderness and affection …Oddly enough, but what is touching most of all, from what the heartaches are, not eyes but … boots, scattered about Shavkat’s paintings. Precious boot, down-at-heel, lost in the meadow grass, more capable of stirring emotions than deeply affecting music. Red boots, old without fail, childish heels from bobbins, well nigh impossible to find today. Somehow all, boys, girls angels, men, women, all of them have a kind of helpless legs. One distinctive feature unites them all. They are so vulnerable, so exposed, that you feel you are under the spell, that even simple look at them is capable of wounding (!) from here, from reality…
And than, lot of questions are arising. First one is: “Why do I need this spurious cuirass; deafening rumbling of armour? Why this forbidding glances, scaring off passers-by? Why this iron mask of inaccessibility, of impregnability? Why?” Everything is so simple. Cotton gown, down-at- heel boots, withered grass, angel with wooden wings, sun sinking in haze, steppe smell, lop-sided house, bag, frayed in long wanderings…And here, it is bliss…The only need is warmth. Shavkat has abundance of it. Abundance enough for everyone. There is not an active sun, sun that burns. There is soft gladness of light, which is possible to see… If you have longing… but you have to be ready for tenderness, which changes you, otherwise difficult to survive yet in unaccustomed world. Its name is Love… To be brave enough to take a step… to step into the step… to step into the step… to step into the step of defenceless red boots
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