The heroes of Temo are favourites of children’s dreams, of town folklore (especially colourful in old Tbilisi), and of mystery plays. They are the ones who find the road home, to the church, or to the stage. “Twilight” or “Night”, covered in the mystery of wondrous relationships between what may be people or puppets, brought to life by eternity itself, which peers through the window like a crescent moon. Reality seems to melt, dissolving in alchemical flasks of light, leaving behind glimmers and memories of real life: enigmatic plastic union of people and butterflies, pilgrim figurines and their shadows. The portrait works of Temo are a quiet rebellion against the rules, for the right to be a clairvoyant on the basis of what you feel, not what you see.
"The Twilight" (2003), oil on canvas, 100х120 cm.
In the artist's works, the living matter of color is sometimes divided into a harmony of squares, in which the characters take shelter. A restless, spectacular harmony is felt through the minuscule and the grand, with a sense of humor, and as though the puppet were playing with the person.
The characters, scattered, like tiny creatures, are not elements or parts of a narrative that can be told or transformed into literature. They are part of the painting itself. The work of Temo is a chain of mysteries, poetic mysteries .
"Night" (2003), oil on canvas, 100х120 cm.
The most mysterious element in his works is light. Is it the sun or the moon? If the sun or moon were to become an eternal lumiary by day and by night, human perception would be forever transformed into a state between sleep and walking. This is where the human soul finds its best rest and feels most at home. In our age of stress and endless violence, when the human being has ceased to be the measure of values, there returns a person holding an ice cream, or a small flag, or a flower, or a little glass in hand.
Temo Svirely's work amazes with its humanistic vision of life, of human existence and the world, with its strange characters and their wondrous metamorphoses into a flower, a butterfly, a jester, a knight, a puppy, a cloud-weathervane, or into the shadow of themselves.
"Living Mater" (2002), oil on canvas, 150х85 cm.
The artist surprises with a distinctive space, trembling like the petals of an Eastern lantern, a space that is boundless, beyond borders, fences, or partitions. This is how free paper kites reign in the air, released by a child's hand, like the birds in spring.
Temo has his own meridians and parallels, his own experience of the life of the person-doll and the doll-person. The street performance is remarkably fitting for our holidays and weekdays, our daily wanderings, our meals, our listening to how the grass grows and how the bird sings.
"Forty four persons" (2002), oil on canvas, 65х130 см.
In essence, the lexicon of his works is an allegory of modernity's evolution, by no means a chronicle. Thus his objects and characters seem like guests from an artistic alphabet: C‒clown, F‒flag, H‒horseman, E‒embryo, C‒clock. The letters form words, and the symbols come to life in the street theatre.
Temo's painterly reflections are born of radiant manifestations of the soul, which at time sees differently and better than the eyes. The surface of the painting attracts nuances of light, which overcome the unambiguity of paint, and give the coloristic suite something secret, untouched, consecrating the distance between the viewer and the canvas for observation and contemplation.
Such important works as “Private life”, “Raising children”, “Twilight”, together with the alluring intimate canvases, form a link between the characters of the paintings themselves and the secret of the artist's kinship with his characters and viewers.
"Raising Children" (2002), oil on canvas, 45х100 cm.
An attentive gaze cannot miss the artist's inventive illogicalities: above the head of a faceless girl, "grows" a second head, a doll one. Within the composition, little pictures with “portraits” are at play, with a note of self-parody; the characters appear stark naked yet crowned.This elite, capricious game of glass beads is a cryptogram of emotions. A fine line of motivations is an expressive sign of the works of Temo Svirely. It is poetic and spectacular, and always unique in its intricacy and variation. Temo creates the theme of “cheap” jewels, like a gold nugget amid crude rubbish.
"Ephemera" (2003), oil on canvas, 100х120 cm.
“Ephemera” is an independent element of black, a space of eternity, with the single small flame of a red human (or celestial, incorporeal?) figure. A lost butterfly has strayed from its orbit, like a person from a fateful path. In this work is an infernal formula of the immeasurable. And who knows where the sun hides? Dreams? Human life? Through the artist's bared spiritual sphere, an anxious perception of modernity peers through.
"Street Theatre" (2003), oil on canvas, 80х100 cm.
The uniqueness of Temo Svirely is in the attempt to convey the many-dimensioned world, where the game is condensed into ritual. The creativity of Temo answers to our spiritual focus, to our life and artistic experience, a lending his humanistic visions a sense that is not entirely utopian.
Igor Dychenko
2003