_{Myśli o Babilonie/Thoughts of Babylon 100 x 70 cm Vahan Bego, Pastel, 2004}

Produced in response to the death of Waldemar Milewicz in May 2004.

This text was written for the catalogue for International Biennial Pastel Exhibition 2006. Though It repeats a few things that have already been written on loosavor, there is a special emphasis on Vahan Bego's pastel works and other works have not appeared here yet

Vahan Bego's Pastels

Vahan Bego is first and foremost a sculptor. Which does not mean that his productions in other mediums – be they pencil, ink, oil or pastel - are of second order importance to his sculptures and that his sculptures take precedence, but rather that he approaches his compositions in these mediums with a sculptor’s eye and techniques.

The foundation for anything that Vahan develops into a full-blown work is invariably a drawing. Every single one of his paintings, sculptures or pastels can be traced back to a drawing, most of which are about the size of the palm of your hand. These drawings, having provided the solid basis for a work, are buried away in unwieldy archives. Frequently they are dug up again many years later and used as genomic templates from which new works can be generated, often in a different medium. In this way, whilst being almost identical in compositional terms, the new versions take on unique characteristics as they are reshaped in pastel rather than oil, and when they are inspired with the artist’s current experience.

The central figure in the pastel September of Jelenia Gora (1997), with the dimensions 50 x 70 cm, would later find itself covering 100 square meters of a cereal elevator in Zgorzelec.

_{September of Jelenia Gora 1997, Pastel, 50 x 70 cm}

_{WAZE Artistic Image of United Europe Ceramic bas-relief, 1998 (photo by Nani Bego)}

Vahan’s pastels are not flat, two-dimensional affairs: he strives to make his figures tangible in a three-dimensional texture. The depth is carefully planned in the composition and then brought to life in the process of execution, in which layers are applied, removed and reapplied with a painstaking, punishing perfectionism.

In terms of influences, Vahan has a deep admiration for the pastels of Degas, on account of their depth, which Vahan puts down to Degas’ brilliance as a sculptor. He contrasts Degas to the improvisation and emotional directness which tends to characterize impressionism: Degas’ work is the outcome of ruthless discipline and ceaseless wrestling with form.

Vahan developed his drawing skills in Armenia, when, day after day, his high school teacher sent him out into the city, instructing him to sketch scenes from everyday life. Later, as a student of sculpture, Vahan experimented with different mediums in his compositions, sometimes using charcoal and pastels. However, he really developed his skills in these mediums after he arrived in Poland in 1993, armed only with pencils, paper and a set of pastels. Being unable to afford the materials he required for sculpting, Vahan’s focus on pastels, and later on oil paints, was initially a result of economic necessity.

After finding that he could apply the tools of his sculpting trade to pastel and oil, Vahan found he had to master an element that sculptors are not accustomed to dealing with: colour. Vahan’s approach to colour is intuitive, in the sense that he does not follow rules that are instilled in schools or which have been passed down through generations. His intuition does not open the gates to an uncontrolled outpouring of emotion, however. A colour ‘feels right’ or ‘feels necessary’ because it is symbolic, because it accesses a deep level of primordial symbolism. Though his works frequently have an intense emotional content, the emotions are distilled and refined into meticulously and arduously carved symbols, as Vahan values shamanistic wisdom above the banalities of personal expression.

Vahan describes himself as a ‘filter of experience’. His works all derive from the impulses, experiences and observations of everyday life. Consequently his pastels are in stark contrast to the abstract experiments with colour which characterize the work of so many of his contemporaries. With Vahan, a work can be triggered by an item of news, by a friendship, or by the joys and tragedies of love, but these events are filtered and rendered into symbolic monuments captured in bronze, or on canvas or card.

A good example of this process is the pastel Thoughts of Babylon (2004), which was created in response to hearing the news that Waldemar Milewicz, the Polish war correspondent, had been shot and killed in Iraq, in May 2004, when he was on the way back to Camp Babilon. The harrowing beauty of the finished pastel pays its respects to Milewicz and at the same is a more universal symbol of nostalgia and longing.

_{Sitting on a Chair 2002, charcoal, 9 x 13 cm}

_{Myśli o Babilonie/Thoughts of Babylon 100 x 70 cm Vahan Bego, Pastel, 2004}

Other examples are The Dream of Don Quixote and Saint Sebastian, both of which arose from intense experiences - one joyful and one tragic – that have been distilled into personally interpreted symbols, and The Brushwood Gatherer, which gained international recognition.

_{Monumental Bed Pławna, August 2001}

Having produced some truly huge sculptures and oil paintings - such as the sculpture Monumental Bed (2001), the oil painting Volcano (2001) and projections for concerts by the band 100KA (2005) - Vahan has come to realize, particularly through the medium of pastel, that often the smaller the work, the more monumental it can be.

Pastel is also a unique medium for Vahan because, with patience and rigor, it can be made to conjure up the magical textures and layers latent in the world of objects we take for granted with our utilitarian perception.

_{Lullaby Pastel 1998, 23 x 31 cm}

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_{Girl with Cactus, 100 x 70cm, Vahan Bego, May 2006, Pastel}

Details

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_{The Dream of Don Quixote, 70 x 100cm, Vahan Bego, Pastel, May 2006}

1. Interpreting the Symbol
2. Dulcinea
3. A Love Story
4. Sculpterly Painting

"It seems to me," said Sancho, "that the knights who behaved in this way had provocation and cause for those follies and penances; but what cause has your worship for going mad? What lady has rejected you, or what evidence have you found to prove that the lady Dulcinea del Toboso has been trifling with Moor or Christian?"

"There is the point," replied Don Quixote, "and that is the beauty of this business of mine; no thanks to a knight-errant for going mad when he has cause; the thing is to turn crazy without any provocation, and let my lady know, if I do this in the dry, what I would do in the moist; moreover I have abundant cause in the long separation I have endured from my lady till death, Dulcinea del Toboso; for as thou didst hear that shepherd Ambrosio say the other day, in absence all ills are felt and feared; and so, friend Sancho, waste no time in advising me against so rare, so happy, and so unheard-of an imitation; mad I am, and mad I must be until thou returnest with the answer to a letter that I mean to send by thee to my lady Dulcinea...

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes: Chapter XXV

1. Interpreting the Symbol

"I interpreted the symbol of Don Quixote, rather than Cervantes" Vahan

The capsid head of the Don Quixote meme contains code which gets transcribed as the symbol of the comical dreamer. Packed in with this symbol are certain received opinions concerning the folly of pursuing dreams and the dangers of wishful thinking. Stray but a little from the path of realism and practicality and there are quixotic phrases waiting to bring you back into the fold: you are tilting at or fighting windmills.

Infected with a dose of Cervantes' irreverent treatment of his protagonist, the ready-to-hand symbol of Don Quixote is entirely laughable, safe to snigger at and disarmed of any meaningful philosophical or emotional component.

Cervantes' Don Quixote loses his wits to philosophy and the literature of chivalry:

You must know, then, that the above-named gentleman whenever he was at leisure (which was mostly all the year round) gave himself up to reading books of chivalry with such ardour and avidity that he almost entirely neglected the pursuit of his field-sports, and even the management of his property; and to such a pitch did his eagerness and infatuation go that he sold many an acre of tillageland to buy books of chivalry to read, and brought home as many of them as he could get... In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits. His fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it. DQCh1

But Don Quixote is not an idle, ineffectual dreamer. He takes his 'madness' out for a walk in the big, bad world:

In short, his wits being quite gone, he hit upon the strangest notion that ever madman in this world hit upon, and that was that he fancied it was right and requisite, as well for the support of his own honour as for the service of his country, that he should make a knight-errant of himself, roaming the world over in full armour and on horseback in quest of adventures, and putting in practice himself all that he had read of as being the usual practices of knights-errant; righting every kind of wrong, and exposing himself to peril and danger from which, in the issue, he was to reap eternal renown and fame. Already the poor man saw himself crowned by the might of his arm Emperor of Trebizond at least; and so, led away by the intense enjoyment he found in these pleasant fancies, he set himself forthwith to put his scheme into execution.

In the project of 'putting in practice' what he has read, and 'righting every kind of wrong', Don Quixote embarks on the quintessential revolutionary trajectory: the attempted transformation of reality in accordance with ideals, and the inevitable, comical disappointment that results when these ideals backfire against the recalcitrance and unmalleability of the real.

However, for Vahan, there is an essential nobility in the knight's plan. The knight-errant refuses to let reality to get the better of him: his dreaming is a revolt against the imposed reality of the dreary, petty-minded collective who insist that an inn is just an inn, a windmill is just a windmill and a wench is just a wench.

Don Quixote renders himself incomprehensible to others by replicating the language of chivalry in everyday life. He is dismissed as mad and sniggered at, but he takes this in his stride because he is only mad to them, as he follows the logic necessitated by his own plan - to make the world a more chivalrous place. In this way, Don Quixote is a symbol of those artists who refuse to accept the prevailing perceptions and narratives and seek to mold their realities into the shapes generated by their imaginations. Instead of horse, armour and lance, the artist criss-crosses the country armed with CD-ROMs and DVDs, and fortifies his castle-studio with sculptures and canvases. Or if war breaks out, the artist might be forced to flee, canvases under arm.

Ucieczka z miasta z serii Don Kichot (Escape from the City, from the Don Quixote series), Vahan Bego, 1994, 100 x 70 cm

2. Dulcinea

Observe too, Sancho, that these traitors were not content with changing and transforming my Dulcinea, but they transformed and changed her into a shape as mean and ill-favoured as that of the village girl yonder; and at the same time they robbed her of that which is such a peculiar property of ladies of distinction, that is to say, the sweet fragrance that comes of being always among perfumes and flowers. For I must tell thee, Sancho, that when I approached to put Dulcinea upon her hackney (as thou sayest it was, though to me it appeared a she-ass), she gave me a whiff of raw garlic that made my head reel, and poisoned my very heart. DQChX

Don Quixote never meets the 'real' Dulcinea in the course of Cervantes' book. She appears to him in dreams and when he is (according to Sancho Panza at least) under the spell of an enchanter - the spell makes Dulcinea look like an ordinary peasant girl who reeks of garlic.

Don Quixote only claims to have 'met' Dulcinea four times in his life (but admits she might not have actually seen him on these occasions) and he is not particularly forthcoming when pressed to give concrete details about her hometown and family, but eventually he lets slip her parents' names:

"So, so!" said Sancho; "Lorenzo Corchuelo's daughter is the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, otherwise called Aldonza Lorenzo?"

"She it is," said Don Quixote, "and she it is that is worthy to be lady of the whole universe."

"I know her well," said Sancho, "and let me tell you she can fling a crowbar as well as the lustiest lad in all the town. Giver of all good! but she is a brave lass, and a right and stout one, and fit to be helpmate to any knight-errant that is or is to be, who may make her his lady: the whoreson wench, what sting she has and what a voice! I can tell you one day she posted herself on the top of the belfry of the village to call some labourers of theirs that were in a ploughed field of her father's, and though they were better than half a league off they heard her as well as if they were at the foot of the tower; and the best of her is that she is not a bit prudish, for she has plenty of affability, and jokes with everybody, and has a grin and a jest for everything..."

These factual details are of no concern to Don Quixote: Dulcinea is a dream, a literary muse that he is pursuing on the Earth rather than on paper:

It is not to be supposed that all those poets who sang the praises of ladies under the fancy names they give them, had any such mistresses. Thinkest thou that the Amarillises, the Phillises, the Sylvias, the Dianas, the Galateas, the Filidas, and all the rest of them, that the books, the ballads, the barber's shops, the theatres are full of, were really and truly ladies of flesh and blood, and mistresses of those that glorify and have glorified them? Nothing of the kind; they only invent them for the most part to furnish a subject for their verses, and that they may pass for lovers, or for men valiant enough to be so; and so it suffices me to think and believe that the good Aldonza Lorenzo is fair and virtuous; and as to her pedigree it is very little matter, for no one will examine into it for the purpose of conferring any order upon her, and I, for my part, reckon her the most exalted princess in the world... to put the whole thing in a nutshell, I persuade myself that all I say is as I say, neither more nor less, and I picture her in my imagination as I would have her to be, as well in beauty as in condition...

Being a figment of Don Quixote's imagination, Dulcinea is eternally inaccessible and immutably cruel in her absence:

DON QUIXOTE'S LETTER TO DULCINEA DEL TOBOSO

"Sovereign and exalted Lady,- The pierced by the point of absence, the wounded to the heart's core, sends thee, sweetest Dulcinea del Toboso, the health that he himself enjoys not. If thy beauty despises me, if thy worth is not for me, if thy scorn is my affliction, though I be sufficiently long-suffering, hardly shall I endure this anxiety, which, besides being oppressive, is protracted. My good squire Sancho will relate to thee in full, fair ingrate, dear enemy, the condition to which I am reduced on thy account: if it be thy pleasure to give me relief, I am thine; if not, do as may be pleasing to thee; for by ending my life I shall satisfy thy cruelty and my desire.

"Thine till death,

"The Knight of the Rueful Countenance." DQChXXV

The knight-errant tortures himself with his own ideal and turns crazy without external provocation. The fact that the products of Don Quixote's imagination are unattainable means that his adventures could theoretically go on forever: they are a constant source of stimuli, fuel and purpose, at least until they are eventually undermined by terminal disenchantment. This disenchantment is inevitable since Aldonza's role is to be incapable of fulfilling the dream of Dulcinea, even if she knows what is being demanded of her.

3. A Love Story

Pocałunek w Knajpie (The Kiss in the Pub) , Vahan Bego, 1994, 50 x 70cm, oil on canvas

"She was a poet, very hot... I watched her kiss this guy in the pub and went straight home and painted this. I was that wound up! This is the dream of her..."

Mechanika Miłości (The Mechanics of Love), Vahan Bego, 1994, 130 x 90cm oil on canvas

"She becomes a reality, but she always said I dreamed her up... The shadows are important here. At this time there was a huge stained glass window in the corridor outside my flat. I was fascinated by the shadows it threw on walls and people. They added an illusionary layer and seemed to have a life of their own... Light and shadow making love..."

W Gorącym Powietrzu Miedzianej Kuchni (In the Hot Air of A Kitchen in Miedzianka), Vahan Bego, 1995 oil on canvas

Miedzianka was destroyed during the war and only two buildings remain. We lived in this kitchen for a month in the summer. I did the painting in the kitchen... You see Don Quixote there - he was inside me for a year...

Dziewczyna przy Telewizorze (Girl In Front Of The Television), Vahan Bego, 1995, 90 x 130 cm, oil on canvas

This is the end of the relationship. In front of the TV. The end of the dream.

Don Quixote as Saint Sebastian, oil on canvas, 130 x 99 cm, 1995, Private Collection in Moscow

"After 35 paintings, I shot Don Quixote with Saint Sebastian"

Saint Sebastian 2006

4. Sculpterly Painting

"I tried to make the hair very logical... You know when you dream and everything sprouts weird connections? Well that's what's going on here..."

"I approach painting as a sculptor. I want to feel that I can put my arms round the figures."

"The shadows again - the stained glass is reflecting on Dulcinea's face. I needed light and brightness to contrast with Don Quixote and Dulcinea, so the field is a memory of Armenia..."

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Ulica Mostowa, Poznań 7.07.2006

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_{Nani's Nude, Vahan Bego, June 2006, Bronze @ Ventzi Gallery, Poznań}

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Most Teatralny (Theatre Bridge)

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