Valda Villeruša asamblāžu pasaule
Valdis Villerušs’ World of Assemblage

Summary/Abstract: More than one hundred years have already passed since objects appeared in the works of art that underwent major changes in both content and form. The initial daring to overcome artists’ centuries-old ambitions to capture reality, especially manifested in trompe l’oeil effects, brought in the use of real objects resulting in avant-garde innovations. Assemblage as the intellectual, provocative, surprising, witty or poetic composition of objects was established as an independent medium of artistic expression. Today it exists both autonomously and as an integral part of physically more developed forms in terms of content, including interdisciplinary ones. Graphic artist, book designer, professor of the Latvian Academy of Art Valdis Villerušs (1942) is one of the most outstanding and consistent assemblage artists in Latvia. His works, increasingly noticed by art observers in the last decade, attract attention with their peculiar mysterious and intellectual nature, prompting the author of this article to explain and define what might be the key to and significance of the originality of his works. Valdis Villerušs was born in the small Latvian town of Ikšķile and graduated from the Graphics Department of the State Academy of Art (now the Latvian Academy of Art) in 1968, specialising in book graphics. Since the beginning of his professional career, he has designed more than 250 editions and authored a substantial number of diverse publications, including in foreign languages, dealing with the study and analysis of the history of book art in Latvia. His professional output also includes various exhibitions and educational lectures on these subjects as well as printmaking techniques. The artist’s interest in old publications, the ways they were used and types of metal fittings, resulted in the creation of several Latvian and even European-level collections; these include 1000 old printed works, Latvian graphic artists’ wood engravings and probably the widest material of historical letters testifying to the traditions of sending news from as long ago as the 17th century. They provide high quality and inclusive information on the history of book art. Villerušs’ expert knowledge, together with a logical, rational approach based on historical analogies and a fine sense of composition, have made him the most experienced and authoritative book publishing professional in both the scientific and the practical, book design sense. It was possibly this enthusiasm for history and the collection of various objects that in the 1990s encouraged him to gradually turn from traditional printmaking to assemblage that allowed more free and creative expression. In 2002, when Villerušs exhibited his works to a wider audience in the hall of the Latvian Academy of Art for the first time, he described them as “manipulations with books” in which their painterly qualities have been emphasised. The aesthetic aspect is very significant in his works but none of the compositions is purely decorative or just visually fascinating. A bookbinder’s wooden vice used to clamp 18th century editions, old wooden pegs catching into Sebastian Münster’s (1488–1552) Cosmographia of 1550, a child’s simple, worn-out moccasin composed into an ethnographic frame, with its wrinkled edge coinciding with the decorative, somewhat robust carving of the frame, an assemblage of various Latvian artists’ wood-engraving blocks – the historical elements in his works are viewed from the humane perspective of culture. The provocative, sentimental, metaphorical or associative component of the interpretation is achieved through the arrangement of the objects. When the first solo exhibition of Villerušs’ assemblages opened ten years later in the Bastejs gallery in Riga, the unfettered nature of the themes manifested itself much more strikingly – there were interplays of forms and colours through similarities and contrasts, references to artistic events in Latvia and elsewhere, using iconic newspapers, magazines and exhibition catalogues in the compositions, as well as erotic and provocative solutions. In his next exhibitions in 2014, Villerušs’ interest in book publishing was more clearly expressed, probably due to the specifics of the venues – the Latvian National Library and Latvian Academy of Sciences, but the artist did not avoid provocative works even there. The composition “In Memoriam. Dedication” (2010–2011) features a 1739 Bible bound to the edition “Bottoms” with sadomasochistic carefulness and purposefulness; moreover, huge old rusty nails were boldly inserted in the sacred texts as bookmarks but a crumpled banknote has been pushed behind a cord in the spread of the Bible. This work was noticed by representatives of the church who asked the artist to remove the banknote from the work. The exhibitions of 2017 and 2018 presented geometric and narrative parallels between measuring instruments – rulers, dividers, protractors – along with formal solutions interpreted in printed works. Also on show were philosophically witty compositions such as “Prominence 2” (2017), an ironic play on the dual use of a saw. Villerušs’ works of recent years can be more aptly described as poetic stagings of reminiscences, comprising old editions with the discoveries made in them. They were exhibited in museum-like showcases with the use of the artist’s favourite old, rusty nails, symbolically creating an abandoned nest. There were also typical Junk Art style memorial plaques made of fragments and shards of once beautiful objects and “witnesses” of events. The artist. whose scope of interests and knowledge extends beyond not only Latvia’s but also Europe’s borders, has found a comprehensive way of using his experience in assemblage. The objects included in them often have cultural-historical value, thus these compositions become “symbol-objects”. They are so rich in meanings that they can even characterise a culture and an epoch. In addition, such assemblages allow us to examine these de-contextualised objects more successfully than if they had stayed in their own environment. They are also raised to the level of symbolic artefacts, creating original time capsules.

• Details
• Contents