Discrepancies… conflicts and contradictions and the divergence of accomplishments from expectations disrupt the flow of ordinary life. This interrupted life is the primary object of Yerbolat Tolepbay’s creative explorations.

The artist was born and raised during the Soviet period, when many people yearned to live in another world—one less monolithic and more free. Times changed, and dreams came true; but society was and remains in a state of a constant conflict, confronting discrepancies and vain expectations. The idea of the community, a group functioning as a uniform organism, is an illusion because it is composed of diverse individualities. Emotional discord—caused by distrusts, disagreements and misunderstandings—becomes concentrated deep in our souls and disrupts the ordinary rhythm of everyday life.

To express these internal contradictions, inevitable in the human condition, the artist contrasts opposite, almost mutually exclusive, features in his art. In Yerbolat Tolepbay’s paintings, one can trace a synthesis between East and West, tradition and innovation, figurativeness and abstraction, narrative and contemplation. The artist’s unique creative style lies in his constant search for harmony and common ground between these oppositions. He aspires to catch and render not that which is visible, but that which is perceptible, sensual, and metaphysical. Despite their lack of concreteness, there is action in his works: in them movement is held in static tension, while characters and objects, losing their connections to reality, transform into abstractions.

The external world, an inexhaustible source of images, plots and characters, inspires the artist’s creative searches. Depicting familiar objects and phenomena in simple, ordinary situations, Tolepbay strives to reflect their internal essence, to seize and render them in the many states that arise from the constant processes of interaction and interrelation. However, the language of realistic representation is inadequate to express such phenomena because of its excessive straightforwardness. As a result, Tolepbay’s works are characterized by stylization, a lack of details, the use of conventions, and an aspiration to simultaneously abandon literal reference to the surrounding environment without effecting complete separation from it.

Hypertrophy of color is another stylistic feature of Tolepbay’s painting. His canvases are colorful meditations, summoning forth intricate harmonies from his compositions. The viewer is plunged into unhurried, empathetic contemplation. Color accents, brave combinations of local spots on monochrome backgrounds, provide a contrast between dramatic tension and gentle tonal transitions. The abstract, colorful mosaic is unexpectedly transformed into a narrative plot. All is directed at creating the other, parallel painterly reality in which color produces certain states, sensations and feelings.

Western critics have called Yerbolat Tolepbay’s unusual creative manner a “magical expressionism” in which the artist’s manifest reality and emotional states, European and Asian cultures, are interlaced.

Nomadic culture plays a dominant role in the merger of Eastern and Western artistic traditions in Tolepbay’s painting. His vision is that of the timeless nomad who creatively comprehends and interprets the modern world. The pillars of national traditions, the sources of the Kazakh worldview, are combined with the modernist painterly tendencies. The painter depicts the cozy, harmonious atmosphere of the Kazakh yurt and the unbounded space of the native steppe with the same ease and spontaneity as that with which he treats the inner tension of a conflict and the clear psychology of his figures. By rendering life’s fleeting moments, the artist attempts to capture and convey the eternal, undiminished value of love; the struggle of good and evil; the search for a lost link between man, nature and the cosmos; links between epochs; and the inevitability of time’s passage.

By abandoning the figurative treatment of common situations and images, Yerbolat Tolepbay endows them with symbolic qualities and implications: the hem of skirt symbolizes a magical sacrament; a swing and a skipping-rope suggest momentary detachment from the earth.

Many of his works show the doorway of the yurt, symbolizing the transition to a parallel reality. The door divides the composition into two parts, allowing the artist to simultaneously present to the viewer the interior and exterior of the yurt. Being at once in two different spaces, the viewer is immersed into a state of comprehending a symbolic reality through images of the concrete physical world.

A peculiar feature of the painter’s figures is their disengagement from the external world and absolute self-absorption even as they engage in shared action. The artist’s heroes attempt to penetrate into the human subconscious as the main source of our actions, thoughts and motivations, causing a state of self-contemplation.
One favorite motif in Tolepbay’s art is the dancing figure. Like the dervish’s dance, the complete immersion in dance, the arabesque quality of a pair of raised hands, the mysterious spinning, and the rhythmic placement of dancers are a visual form of meditation, a departure from reality to a place where there exists only a man, and consciousness of the music directs his movements. In Yerbolat Tolepbay’s treatment of color, music achieves its visual embodiment.

And finally, a key image in his painting is that of woman in her various manifestations. These are the ing?nue, the charming girl and an adult woman. The master tries to comprehend their inner worlds. Women are shown engaged in different tasks: working, collecting crops, playing with a child, talking with a girlfriend, resting, carrying water from the river, or sewing at a machine—in each, remaining invariably an embodiment of the beautiful. The girl with the inclined head sitting on a camel is a laconic, sacral sign, captivating in its magic and grace. The artist’s canvases glorify the woman-mother, whose sacred mission is to give life by means of love’s divine energy. Many of his works are pervaded by a sense of expectation: the image of a pregnant woman, or people in the desert looking forward with hope—a symbolic treatment of premonitions of future changes.

The subject matter and characters in Yerbolat Tolepbay’s works express his personal interpretation of images, distinct from others in modern painting. Building upon the great artistic achievements and innovations of the 20th century, the artist strives to achieve and introduce something original and deeply individual of his own. In his painting, the artist is driven not so much by the aspiration to express emotional experiences and feelings, but is instead “thirsts to render his own ideas about this world, obtained along a path of ecstatic and agonizing contemplation.”

Catherine Reznikova,
Ph.D. in Arts