Askar Esdaulet

In the 1990s a new generation of artists emerged in Kazakhstan, who were brave, energetic and ready for risky experiments. It could not have been otherwise: it was the period of formation of a young state, and the time for new opportunities that provided the wonderful sense of freedom and openness to the world. The artists refused their predecessors' guidelines and promoted their own views and concepts. In contrast to the 1970s and 1980s, in which the European artistic trends of the 20th century were explored and adapted to some extent, the generation of the 1990s gave more consideration to their native land's arts, the national decorative and applied arts, the Turkic archaic arts and broader - to the philosophy of the East. This consideration was well reflected in this generation leaders' techniques and stylistics. And Askar Esdaulet, an artist and a sculptor, takes a special place among such leaders.

Askar was born and grew up in the village of Vanovka, to the south of Shymkent, in a large Kazakh family, in which there were seven children. As he says, they could not take a special care of each kid. But his internal potential, or in other words, his natural giftedness did not allow him being just like others. Quite the contrary, he felt a subconscious desire to stand apart and be the first; not just "the first", but "the best"! Perhaps, it was his ambitions what urged him to choose the creative profession and helped him become a master having such a pronounced individual artistic style.

After graduating from a secondary school, Askar travelled to Shymkent and got enrolled in the Interior design department of the Kasteyev's College of Arts. He worked hard while studying. Persistence and, of course, inherent talent helped him achieve serious success in the picture technique and painting. Askar Esdaulet's wonderful realistic still-life paintings still adorn the College's walls.

On the third course, he met Vitaliy Simakov, father of the Shymkent's artistic avant-garde. Being a peculiar artist, Simakov at the same time was a talented pedagogue. He knew how to direct a student's natural talent in a proper way and help his or her inherent potentials show. And the main thing is that it was him, who actually formed the modern view on the evolution of arts and its actual problems in young artist. Long conversations and joint work of Esdaulet with Simakov have changed his ideas about the capabilities of arts. After that he never painted realistic still-life paintings any more...

After he graduated from the College in 1985, he received an assignment to the Mukhina's Higher College of Arts. But he could not take advantage of this opportunity due to banal loss of his passport. And Askar went to Almaty Institute of Theater and Arts. He was placed at the recently created department of sculpture. In the very beginning he thought of transferring to a different department, but decided to stay afterwards. He strives to improve his technical skills and works hard.

Engaging in sculpture helps him rediscover painting for himself. While in Institute, Esdaulet continues painting in oil, but very little - only a single painting per year. He works on trivial images such as "Courtyard", "Iron". The paintings, quite small in size and absolutely grisaille by style, represent varying half-tones: dim gray, light blue and brown. That was influence of Simakov's recommendations: to care more about the idea and the concept while disregarding the variety of colors. A sculptor's way of thinking leaves its traces as well: the created images are plastic, solid and convincingly material.

The viewers saw the artist's first painting - "Iron" -at "The Crossroad" exhibition of informal arts in 1989, which was quite programmatic for Kazakhstan. What drew the people's attention was a unitary, isolated object singularized from a universe of the like being at the center of the artist's focus. Such ideas as self-sufficiency of any form and creation of a substantive artistic surrounding for it found its continuation in the master's further works.

By the time of finishing the Institute, it became clear to Esdaulet that he could not continue engaging in sculpture seriously due to lack of appropriate technical and material base. Painting becomes the main means of realization of his creative ideas for the next decade. He was back to sculpture only in the first half of the 2000s and put his fundamental concepts of vision on it.

After graduation from the Institute in 1991, Askar travelled to France for a year. One of the European foundations invited ten artists from the former USSR to live and work for a while in Paris. Esdauletov was the only artist, who was chosen from Kazakhstan. And afterwards he became the only one to make long-term contracts with Belgian and French galleries. The artist travelled to Europe once a year for the following four years (1992-1995), worked there for three or four months and exhibited his works at expositions. Cooperation with the contemporary artists and involvement in the European artistic environment have had a tremendous effect on his professional tastes and style.

Up to the mid 1990s the artist tries various manners, styles and techniques, but the future prominent artist, Askar Esdaulet's style was felt in his works of that time. Gradually more priority is placed on coloristic experiments. With a scientific passion he studied the effects of one color on the canvas to another one, light reflexes and iridescent play of colors. Using different tinge intensities and sharp contrasts, the artists shows dynamics, tension and expression in his works. He makes the paintings sound with powerful vital chords. The main color of his paintings is oftentimes based on collision of additional red and green colors on his palette.

After some time he empirically arrives at a peculiar painting technique, which makes him well-known. The canvas is layered with deep black paint, upon which saturated, usually bright colored paints are applied. The black paint that shows through the upper layer gives a special glow to the surface, activates the color spot making them shine. At the same time deep main background yields integrity to the composition, while uniting and harmonizing oftentimes incompatible colors and tinges.

Now he almost never mixes the paints and uses half-tones. By contrast, he works with pure colors sometimes applying them to large spaces of the canvas and sometimes making fine dashed strokes on it. Such a technique visually draws Esdaulet's artistic works closer to the Kazakh traditional decorative and applied arts. The paintings are kind of "framed" of color spots just like traditional Kazakh "korpe" - a patchwork quilt made from assorted pieces of material of various size and color. Rich local colors are mixed on the canvas just like on a carpet made by a traditional craftswoman. They seem to be scattered randomly and spontaneously chosen from the available set of paints, because they follow an artistic need leading to a finished result, rather than a rational principle. The artist's creative improvisations on the canvas are backed by his professional skills and creative intuition.

The color decorativeness causes conditionality of a spatial construction. In artistic works there are no short-range and long-range plans. Everything follows a plain and this is the reason why human and animal figures are oftentimes shown in unnatural positions and angles like in ancient frescos. Esdaulet refuses the "picturesque and narrative nature" of paintings, which were characteristic to the previous generations. In his paintings we see a timeless world, which is independent of logical rules and realistic consciousness. The imaged objects are freed from naturalistic details in order to convey the essence of things. Mythical animals, two headed birds, varicolored snakes and dragons... and a human becomes a mystical being among them either. These images vary and transform repeatedly just like symbols of an intricate script that enciphers motion, power, flight and perfection.

Compositions of this period demonstrate all forms of the primeval equality: animalistic and anthropomorphic, real and fictitious. They are mysterious and recognizable at the same time, as if they have been taken from ancient tales, legends and myths. Born by a spontaneous artistic gesture, they are akin to archetypes suggested by the collective unconscious.

Oftentimes animals (bulls, rhinos and camels) become the central objects in his paintings. Their brutal and powerful figures are full of internal energy and power. This period of Esdaulet's creative work can be identified as "the animalistic totemism". Doctor of arts R.A. Ergaliyeva in her paper "Ethnic and cultural traditions in Kazakhstan's modern art" notes that "he transforms a bull, rhino or a camel into images that are full of vivifying energy of nature. In Esdaulet's interpretation, powerful and massive figures of the animals are perceived in association with memories about the totemic animal cult. Piety of a human before the animalistic mysticism and Esdaulet's mystery of his own existence he persistently keeps emerge in his series of animalistic paintings. And if the human lost some part of his essence in his paintings, then animals, by contrast, possess quintessence of energy and concentrate maximum of physical power and vital potential."

These stylistic techniques have been developed by the artist for several years. And as an artist he is still subject to various tendencies of time, artistic environment and object ideas. During the period of formation of a young sovereign state, daunting problems of the national self-identification excited all the representative of the creative intelligentsia, including artists. Earlier or later they started to shift from entertaining themselves with abstract archetypical themes to understanding their own individual places in this life. Such reflections made them take a closer look at the own nation's history and culture. And it is not the archaic history and culture, but that of the period when the Kazakh nation has already been formed with its own vision, understanding of the world and mentality. And among mythical compositions other Esdaulet's works began to appear with quite different images in focus - bathing ladies, girls in saukele (Kazakh traditional nuptial headgear), and old women. They are not archaic myth characters, but rather those of folkloric histories and legends. The same bright decorativeness of the color does not distinguish them from the entire series of paintings, but the changes in subject are obvious.

After some time - by mid 2000s - new themes began to influence the artistic style of the time. In one of the interviews Askar Esdaulet says: "I am going back to realism. Not to "a social" one, of course, but to the true one. I am shifting to it deliberately and consciously. The air, the color, the light... Take Salakhitdin Aitbayev alone! Of course it does not mean that I paint and will ever paint like they do, because each artist works on a painting through the prism of his or her own time and experience. And one thing is quite clear: a thirst for the simple and a need to shift from abundance of colors to the monochromatic painting have emerged.

Painting "Happiness", Esdaulet's remake to the well-known painting of S. Aitbayev, marked a new period in the master's creative work. It appeared in 2004 at the exhibition that had a symbolic name "Atameken - the land of the fathers" and became very significant for his further creative work development. It was a peculiar acknowledgment gesture for the artists of the sixties, who raised a very important issue of self-identification of the Kazakhs in their works and solved it in their own way by suggesting a new version of the Kazakh artistic style. Esdauletov's desire to follow them and develop their works is realized in a new historic period and using a different artistic language.

But even in "Happiness" and other works created in 2004 no substantial innovations could be sensed. It was hard for him to give up the customary techniques that allowed him convey maximum of his personal vision. Black background, cleanness and laconism of the color preserve the decorativeness and flatness of the image even after the subject has changed. And in the bright tinge flickering, even usual and ordinary images become mysterious symbols.

Everything changed after he travelled to the plein air, which took place in the beginning of 2005 in West Kazakhstan. Askar arrives at understanding of old techniques being unable to solve new artistic problems. Working at the plein air urged him to shift from speculative modernistic constructions to those based on live impressions and image fixations. In order to convey his impressions of boundless steppes and downs of Mangyshlak and sensible ponderability of the air, he refers to the rules of the classical painting. He starts painting on a white canvas. He alters the structure of the works: spatial plans and perspectives began to arrive. By using shades, the artist reproduces the 3-dimensional objects; images of people, animals, structures and landscape come into a subtle equilibrium between conditionality and reality. Strengthening the light and shade transitions lowers the color intensity of the painting. The spots rather flicker than glow, become softer and pastel. And decorativeness gives way to picturesqueness.

Esdaulet shifts to realism. But it is a conditional, poetic realism. His works are realistic by content, not by form. They convey the artist's own interpretation of the surrounding world. It is not a fixation of the real world, but rather the artist's idealized conception of a peculiar "golden age", which through the depth of time is associated with the lost heaven. And like any other myth, it is a conditionally constructed formula of be­ing. The real, complex and dramatic world is contrasted with the peacefulness and timelessness of the Kazakhs' way of life. The artist is interested in the most custom­ary, persistent and typical pictures of the national way of life. The human in his way of life is what comes to the foreground scene. Regular life of the Kazakhs - cattle herding, cow milking, cooking, having tea with guests - is poetized by him like in the Kazakh akyns' stories and songs.

Frequently used compositional technique of the recent times is such that the foreground people's fig­ures get cut sharply and the canvas only contains their heads and, rarely, bodies. It intensifies the composition by relatively widening its dimensions and at the same time creating a single focus for the viewers before the painting and the characters on what is happening in­side in the depth. And there, in fact, nothing is happen­ing - only steppe and hills.

Together with the painter's special attitude towards Aitbayev, the latest works relate on color search to the paintings of another artist of the sixties, Bakhtyar Tabi-yev. There are common pictorial methods in careful and detailed elaboration of color gradation within one tint. But if for Tabiyev it is important to convey a general mood by bold dabs and barely discerned forms, Esdaulet attaches importance to the details. Head's inclination, can's shadow, animal's pose - everything is important and subtle as for color shades. Everything is covered by mist or haze that is so common in Kazakh steps when the air warms up and becomes non-transparent. Steps is a place where the sense of reality vanishes a bit in­tensifying senses of infinity and eternity. And if painters of the sixties strove for a dramatic effect through their paintings, emphasizing attention on the being issues; deep thoughts, introvert reflection, and profound and analytical attitude towards the world and himself can be sensed from Esdaulet's paintings.

Tranquility of steps is broken by fussy city images. Megapolises do not give any hope for rest, they change every day. That is why Esadulet's cities are interlaced skyscrapers where birds live, "celestial cities", in a word. This is also a distinctive myth poetry but oriented not to the traditional past but to the uncertain and that is why uneasy future.

All critics that have referred to Esdaulet's works no­tice his amazing workability. This album, that contains more than two hundred works that do not exhaust the author's creativeness, has proved it. Moreover, whatever period is being observed, there is no notorious "throes of creation". There is inspiration, freedom of expression, and talent. It seems as if the whole number of paint­ings is not a rationally designed composition but is a series of more or less realistic but equally incomprehen­sible and that is why attractive dreams. Askar works very fast, outlining the form by color, and expressively picking up paint from the small palette. The painter's artistic intuition, proven by the experience and work­manship, free associative thinking gives rise to an ini­tial image that can be transformed in the work process but never leaves the author's mind. The artist has only to transfer it to canvas.

The awareness of the multidimensional character of every phenomenon leads to the creation of large se­ries of works. The painter examines every topic from all sides and angles, varying the state, composition, color, and plot. He always searches new ways to approximate visual image to the ideally conceived form. Often the author's concept does not realized on the one painting, dyptiches and polyptiches. Sometimes other gouache and pastel techniques are used. But every time he be­comes fond of a new technique, Esdaulet never rejects his previous experience. He strives for enhancing his it bringing new stylistic tints and shades. Considering this, it is not very surprising that there was a "side ways jump" from painting in 2007- the series of virtu­ally monochrome , brutal, geometrized "Vinuses." They also refer not only to the early experiments of the artist but also to the sculpture's experience. Working with the volume, laconism of forms, and proportion of parts - all tasks that important mostly for sculpture than paint­ing, comes to the first place.

Having received classical education in painting and having gone through a fruitful internship in Europe, sometimes intentionally sometimes subconsciously Esdaulet aspires to combine the forms of folk artistry with the techniques of European modernism. Not coming under the influence of the temptation of contemporary technologies, he is devoted to contemporary painting but subdues its content to the peculiarities of the East­ern man, who is characterized by philosophical think­ing, polysemantic statements that escape direct reading of the meaning.

The work of Askar Esdauletov is a persuasive visu­alization of national consciousness that appears in both formal and substantial sides of painting and is based on transcendental ties not external effects. There are al­most no ethnographic or conventional oriental features. "Nationality" is conveyed rather by the atmosphere or aura of the canvas. The paintings absorb the ideolo­gy and mentality of a Kazakh. The purpose, goal, and meaning of the efforts of the painter, who has proved his ability to develop and continue the best achieve­ments of the Kazakhstani painting, is in this.

Alla Dubrovina