The art of choosing
Askar Yesdauletov is a wanderer, or in other words a nomad, from Sary Arka, also Eurasia, who chooses his own path in the field of his painting.
From the various painting methods of the twentieth century, created by the keen and restless West, Yesdauletov likes, most of all, the language of symbols and metaphors. This gives him the opportunity to abstract himself from pretensions of concrete things and enter the scope of perfect, transcendental reality. The tone of his statement is expression, and creative process is improvisation. His method of world comprehension is intuition, colour is equalled to sensation, and line to thought. Vasily Kandinsky, a creator and follower of that way of 'expression' is his object of adoration.
The language has been found but the next task, frightening in complexity, is 'knowing himself.
The world is so large and in this period of rapid changes, abounds in uncertainty and inconsistency. Life does not hold delight and the contemporaries are depressed. There is the need to find something fundamental in the spiritual space to hold onto, maintain oneself and win in the end. Myths! It, many a time, came to the aid of artists of different epoches. Our age is also engrossed in it, trying to understand the nature, contents and the meaning of ancient mythology. Their quantity is overwhelming. Their meaning do not give in to common reasoning. Myth is a comprehension of unknown by feelings and a figurative way of thinking. One could hardly help being carried away by myths about the origin of the world, its periodic falls and revivals. Yesdauletov is attracted most of all by images of animals with the help of which cosmos emerges from chaos and the non-existent. The most frequent characters are the bull and the snake. A page will not suffice to enumerate all the meanings of those symbols, all the upheavals, all the metamorphoses, through which they go in different mythologies. In Indian mythology, for example, the bull symbolises god and sacrifice at the same time, and the snake - water and fire, the origin of masculinity and femininity followed by the World Mountain and the World Tree. How many levels of understandings could be found in myths about those symbols? To understand the logic of myths is just as difficult as deciphering the canons of oriental wise men. One should just believe them. That is possible if the artist sees the village childhood through an animal's eye, sleeps in embracement with Nature and hears the voices of the grass.
To make his pictures sensitive and imaginative Yesdauletov gives additional qualities to the colours: compactness and impenetrability of the earth, mysteries of ocean depth, incomprehensibility of the distances between objects in space, disharmony of light and darkness, statics and dynamics, finite and infinite. The ability of colours and lines to give a shade of sensation in the field of even just one canvas is overwhelming. Words demand much more.
Myths to the artist offers an opportunity to play with shapes, stretch the muscles so to say, develop imagination, gain the experience of poetic speech and turn the language of colours into that of metaphor.
The East with such magical sounding words like dao, dharma, dsen...carma, sansara, nirvana..., 'pure existence' and 'pure confession' seems to have a magnetic force on Yesdauletov.
The task of teaching colours to meditate is very trying. To start with, one should master the science of contemplation and this can take a whole life time and even eternity.
Like a composer expresses himself and the world through sound, the artist strives to colour his thoughts and sensations, connected with the idea of enlightenment. However, he does not want to create a mandala or black square -graphic formula depicting the presence of something transcendental. Ideally he would like to depict 'complete calm' but that is an oxymoron. Void cannot be coloured. That is why the movement to the target, but not the target itself is what is left to signify. In his pictures, Buddha, although creates a field of influence around himself, is plunged into the expanse of the seducing world around him.
When Yesdauletov returns to the sinful earth, and the ancient nomadic instincts inhabitant of Kazakh mountains and steppes in him awake, images of lonely wild ram or deer in the expanse of the large world appear on his canvas. The deer is symbolized either with the red colour signifying activitness and struggle, or with green -the symbol of everflowering life. These pictures call to mind ancient images of Tamgaly, made by our forefathers, who tried, like we are doing to know the inner and the outer world within and around us.
Bayan Barmankulova
DIDAR KAZAKSTAN 3/1997