RIGA - If you've nothing better to do during this cruellest of months, why not take yourself down to the State Museum of Art to see the new retrospective of Leonids Baulins' meaty Daugavpils-set work.
Tucked away in a small room on the second floor, it offers an interesting glimpse at Latvian art in the 1970s and 80s, and just how quaintly parochial it was. The exhibition is dedicated to the 60th anniversary of Baulins, who was a painter and graphic artist of some repute until his death in 2002. It's also the first retrospective of the artist to be held in Riga.
Baulins became a prominent figure in the Latvian art scene in the 1970s, having studied at the Academy of Art under such outstanding artists as Konrads Ubans and Boriss Berzins. But the artist lived and worked in Daugavpils for most of his life, and this was the curious canvas from which he worked.
A technically gifted painter, Baulins enthusiastically played with color and form right up until the end of his prolific career. He was most at ease when depicting landscapes and fragments of life from his native Daugavpils. There is the bizarre and unsettling "Vakara" (Evening), for instance, in which he depicts a typical Soviet factory drenched in the soft pink and crimson colors of sunset.
The factory itself is a sort of grotesque geometrical abstraction that can barely stand upright due to the inherent contradictions in it.
Or there are his wonderful paintings of the mighty Daugava River, coursing around a bend, the oil scraped across the canvas to grittily portray the water's flux. This is Latvian painting at its most expressive, its most heartfelt.
But Baulins' overall approach to painting was anything but original. He was clearly influenced by his teacher and mentor Boriss Berzins, but he lacked the latter's undoubted brilliance.
Where Berzins created a self-contained artistic legacy that captured rural Latvia on canvas in a breathtakingly beautiful way, turning it into a mythology in its own right, Baulins never seemed to overcome a basic grasp of form that could only express itself in hackneyed and half-thought out imagery. His series of paintings of street musicians, entitled "Duo," is almost embarrassingly reminiscent of early 20th century French art.
It could be that, being an artist in the restrictive environment of the Soviet Union, his limited access to the wider art world in the 70s deluded him into thinking that street musicians resembling cylinders were cutting-edge stuff. But whatever the case, many of the paintings, and especially those with conceptual aspirations, are sadly naive. They are a pastiche of art more than anything else.
That said, Baulins was a much-loved artist in Daugavpils, and he actively contributed a great deal to that neglected city's cultural life, which was no small achievement in itself. He worked on the interiors of public buildings, did stage design and helped arrange several major festivals that came to the city.
The exhibition is an interesting peek at a mediocre artist who was most definitely of a time and place, even if he couldn't quite find an artistic language to do justice to his talent. And besides, mediocrity is beautiful. It should be wholeheartedly supported and encouraged.
