KVT – Leisurely Landscapes

KVT gets into evocative mood

This week a couple of northern European countries have revealed their cultural wares. The Finns on Tuesday night and the Poles on the same afternoon.

Once or twice a year the Poles give us a treat and last May their brilliant young violinist, Alicja Smietana, gave me one of 2011’s most electric moments when she bowed Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto at the Opera House.

This year, until the 10th, well regarded artist Franciszek Ryszard Mazurek (don’t you just love it when you get a chance to warm up the zees/zeds on your keyboard?) had an extensive showing of his landscapes at that very underused and effective art space, the Exhibition House, 29 Hang Bai.

The paintings were apparently executed over one month late last year and relate to Halong Bay in an effectively non touristy and non picture postcard way, and to rural scenes in village areas in the Ha Tay region of greater Hanoi. Mazurek generally has mostly steered clear of expansive views and concentrated on those glimpses that make you feel as though you may have already stored that little bit in your mind’s eye during your own Vietnamese meanderings. Of course, many of the canvasses may have been studies for proposed larger works but you always feel envious of those creative travellers who can store special places away in a non digitalized form.

Personally I didn’t warm to the landscapes that included human figures in their composition, rather I was pulled towards the gems that reminded me of rounding a bend on a remote road and seeing a small bit of what is to me quintissential north Vietnamese mountain scenery (even though these little bits were in that Bay or Ha Tay).

When I first entered the gallery one of these evocative works made the name Eugene von Guerard sit comfortably in my mind…which was coincidental because Geurard brought his northern European realization of Australian landscapes to wide attention circa 1870’s. He followed the German Romantic landscape tradition… but I may be being presumptuous to infer that Mazurek does the same as he interprets the Vietnamese landscape.

Mazurek, like a lot of us newbies to Indochine exotica, is obviously intrigued by rural pagodas and village gates and to find out if his versions sat well with the locals who’ve grown up working, playing and praying around similar buildings, I encouraged some recent Ha Tay-an country immigrants to city life to visit the exhibition. Their unanimous verdict about the said pictures was ‘beautiful’….so who am I to argue!?

One expansive view that really appealed to me was ‘Boundless Red River’.

….beautifully evocative of those long and lazy trips I like to take following the dykes of the river into and through Thai Binh.

A lovely, quiet exhibition. I was there by myself and was nicely swallowed up by it all.