Māris Upzars

Māris Upzars has been producing meditatively romantic, abstract paintings for many years. His works typically display deeply felt, intense colour fields and their relationships. Her outwardly ascetic yet deep paintings speak about the human inner world, our thoughts, feelings and desires which determine our choices and actions. This is also reflected in this painting, in which Upzars searches for a more cutting way of expressing his thoughts regarding order, the battle between the elements, shadow and silence. Although the forms are generalised down to the ascetic level and the painter has declined to use expressive gestures and loud visual effects, he uses the beguiling simplicity of the colour fields to achieve an optimistic, uplifting emotional chord. Upzars’ paintings appear to be highly rational and without randomness. The choice of every colour, the size of every field and the thickness of every borderline is the result of a lengthy process of concentration. But even in this abstraction one senses, deeply hidden in the painting’s structure, natural romantic impulses and the rhythms of Latvian landscapes dear to the artist. 

Order. 2007 (2008).