Looking at Yerbolat Tolepbay’s paintings, one would involuntarily remember the Turkic well-known “When the blue sky above and the reddish-brown earth below were created, between them human sons were created.” This description of the creation of the world engraved on the famous Kul-Tegin stelae fits almost every painting by Tolepbay. The only difference is that the human beings that appear in the haze on the boundary between the blue sky and the light ochre earth are more frequently human daughters than sons.

What is special about them? The proportions of their elongated bodies, as if they were stretching from the earth towards the sky, are fragile. The girls, or the artist’s phantoms, bow their heads. They are expressly gentle. These girls, women and mothers seem to have in them or be given life by the energy of the spirit, not bodily or material energy.

Yerbolat’s women are escaping, slipping out of their bodies. The women’s world in Tolepbay’s paintings is the world of dreams, girlish reveries, women’s hopes and concerns about the future. It is governed by traditional eastern etiquette where feelings are constrained and emotions are silent. Even disputes, doubts, misunderstandings and disagreements are noiseless and covert. This reserve encompasses for the artist the mystery of life concealed in the power, desires and soul of a woman. They hide their feelings in silence and keep their eternal secret, the mystery of life, known to women only.

Yerbolat’s artistic world lives to the laws of a ritual. The actions of his characters are connected with the high order of the universe. They echo the eternal law of things and are, therefore, tangibly sacral. Their gestures are slow, weighted with the memory of the eternal, the past and the recurring. Even in their dance, in its dynamics and rapidness, the women in Yerbolat’s paintings seem to move in the rhyme of the Earth. Planets appear to whirl around their flying skirts and the galaxy is rotating in the bottomless space.

The theme of dance, as an eternal circular motion and a special rhythm comparable to the movement of the universe, is as ancient in the art as the art itself. Tolepbay finds his own tone and perspective in it. His need for a discourse with the world’s titans of painting, The Mystery of Life in Yerbolat Tolepbay’s Paintings
which he demonstrated in his earliest works already, achieves a new level here. He does not tend to manifest his national and “nomadic” self any more, but tries to determine the nature of a human being per se, in its true colours and without idealisation.

Another character of his paintings, a man, helps him to do so. The artist’s perception of a man’s world is totally different. It is significantly more abrupt, controversial and destructive. While women create, men seem to demolish and destroy connections as well as established habits and foundations. Women keep the eternal and what was established and entrusted to them while men strive for new things and leave back the old, even if they have to extinguish something valuable and precious. A man is rough but he is a pioneer looking for new discoveries and new horizons. He changes the picture of life without pity, but amazingly at the same time. His task, his tradition and his creations are different. He is in the search and thirst for changes.

The world of objects in Yerbolat’s paintings may become a little bit more evident than before, as do the belonging of his characters, most often female ones, to specific occupations and life. This impression is provoked by the noticeably more vivid palette and juxtapositions of the open intense colours. However, the inner tuning of the soul and its melody trying rather to break up with the world than attain harmony with it remain the most important themes for the artist. This is what makes his paintings emotionally striking and evokes thoughts, feelings and different reactions.

A comparison of a viewer’s quasi-experience derived from the artist’s paintings – the experience of life as a game of controversies, close-ups but not coming together, or the experience of life as a game of the tragic nature and beauty of being, with the precious flutter of his painting manner, so radiant, luminous and sparkling with a kaleidoscope of all possible as well as inconceivable shades – is paradoxical. Yerbolat’s paintings are positive and life-asserting despite the thoughts about the controversial and ambiguous nature of the world and a human being inside it that try to break through the bitter struggle of spots, lines and contrasts.

A recurring motive in Tolepbay’s works is a reflection about the complexity and overlapping of different, often controversial meanings, so typical of the artistic world and this painter. Inextinguishable colours, in their endless play and shimmering, appear in them as a splash of delight and joy of life.

Calling this artist a philosopher would be an understatement. All his paintings are full of reflections about the essence of being and search for the meaning of life. Turbulent and calm, sharp in his remarks and contemplative, always going forward and unsatisfied with his search, this painter moves from expression to philosophy, from ecstasy to meditation.

He is looking for and finding his eternal and invariable meaning of life in its harmony and controversies.

Raikhan YERALIYEVA,
Doctor of Arts, Professor