Chimeddorj is inviting us, like the light coming softly through a ger, to dive deeper in the Mongolian art through tradition and modern art. His paintings are an invitation to exhilaration with huge steppes and blue sky.
Roots of the Mongolian painting
Mongolian culture and nomadic heritage are bound. The daily life of nomads has been regulated by seasons, cattle since more than 2000 years.
The Mongolian shepherds live in circular tents covered with felt, commonly called “ger”. Inside a ger there is no partition. The circular space is built around the four cardinal points. In the middle lies the hearth, down South, the door, opposite North the altar. The East side is the place of women where meat and diaries are stored and the West side is the place of men where everything related to livestock farming is kept.
Located in the very heart of huge steppes with far horizons, panoramic skyes, the ger is, with is intimacy, the matching infinite landscape. There are grazing yaks, horses and sheep. Here are horse riders. From this way of life, from all the past fairy tells, from this very special relation between horses and men comes the Mongolian painting.
The pictorial technique
Chimeddorj paints with watercolours, sketches with ink on rice paper, paints with oil on big size canvass. The sketchs on rice paper are like a game for him. He is exploring new fields throught those sketchs. He blackens with enthusiasm hundreds of these thin cream colour sheet. He sketches horses and portraits with straight lines or with curved lines. Inscriptions, signatures, stamps, patterns and cuts off are the source of his big paintings. Colour stains regulate his imaginative compositions. The painter’s gesture is brisk and free.
On the canvass he links the westerns techniques of oil paintings with the vision of nomads at infinite land.
His canvasses represent huge steppe landscapes with soft green, golden skyes. Ochre colour with yellow and red splinters contrast with sharp blue and green of cold winter days. The work is structured by flat colours. Whereas traditional paintings use a “spinning” perspective, he puts the viewer in the position of a man looking to the infinite steppe. Far ends are both the ground and the sky. The multiplicity of point of views reach the climax when characters painted in full-length are juxtaposed with small figures. Everything is floating, one loses his marks.
Poetry
Chimeddorj is lika an eye. With his light gesture he paints horses moving and shows their very attitude. He is very accurated with the equine race. His stroke turns into a child’s one to represent the past and current Mongolian life, women with traditional headdresses, insides of apartments. The continuity of his styles is found in the sensitivity and serenity of his art work, in the look the characters are glancing at each others.
If he should be compared to other artists, it would be Manet for the flat colours used, Picasso for his dexterity or Miro for his childish gesture. But he will be surely among the greatest. However Chimeddorj has acquired his proper style whose subjects are deeply linked to the Mongolian culture. He is said to be the ambassador of his motherland.
