159 - Scythian horse to the rear end back

This magnificent animal was an ornament of a horse harness princely certainly, because recovered in a large Kurgan in the city Sagly Bajy in the region of Tuva on the border of Mongolia. (The great warrior s' was buried with his weapons and perhaps his horse, plus containers that contained food.) The original bronze is in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, it measures 4.2 x 5cm and date of IV century BC For the pleasure to discover again, here presented in my own way, carved in low relief in negative in a wooden pine assembled here fifty years, and from this mold, to draw a single plaster reinforced then raise it to give it more volume, and this, with components of polyesters, polish, and paint it with acrylics and finish with a mesh of small circles superimposed with paintings Interfering mixed with iridescent. Now turn to the art of the steppes or Scythian art, an art which is essentially composed of decorative items such as jewelry, decorations, weapons and equipment of the rider, the horse harness, produced by the nomadic tribes of the Pontic steppe stretching from Kazakhstan to the modern Baltic Sea. These nomads were among the oldest horse breeders in the world! Nomadic peoples have represented many scenes of hunting and fighting between animals. The theme of the Wild, a cat or a bear jumping on its prey, is very common. Everyday scenes of horse breeding and sheep are also shown. The Assyrian art has brought a taste of realism and naturalism to his tribes, who then sent throughout Eurasia, including the Germanic peoples and Asian. China has received from such an important contribution of realism of the Art of the Steppes at various Mongol invasions. Deltas of the Black Sea to the plains of Mongolia lies the vast steppes of the band. It crosses the entire Asian continent. It is the road of the nomads, not to be confused with the Silk Road, which connected with one another, further south, the towns of sedentary. The nomads have always fascinated sedentary. They borrowed their techniques, such as metallurgy, and with these loans they have developed a culture powerfully original. In return, they were irrigated, fertilized crops they grazed, or in which they competed, giving them the echoes of unknown worlds. The art of the steppes keeps its mystery. He was born anywhere. (A crib can be a vagabond?) It has the refined taste of travelers who can snap up the best in their path to transform it according to their requirements. Nothing in common with those people who set up shop, who build palaces, silos, sanctuaries where they can accumulate, spread out, getting lost in long diversions. The art of the nomads going straight to the point, it does not separate the useful from the pleasant. It does not tolerate dead weight, spartan, but impregnated gestures and daily rituals. "Art Scytho-Siberian steppes is undoubtedly one of the most striking communion between man and the universe" according to André Malraux. In this vast area, these populations, cultures differentiated but all seem to attach great importance to the shamanistic ritual (in which the animal plays a major role), created in the interests of efficiency a magical world of strange creatures, influenced times by China, now the Middle East. Real link between the Far East and the West, they will be behind the ornamental repertoire of the Celts, Vikings and that the barbarians of the Dark Ages. This vast area between and connecting the same time those of large sedentary civilizations of Europe, the Middle East, India and China. These have often seen as primitive nomads jealous of the wealth of "civilized" and prowling like wolves on their borders. When they began to disperse, these tribes were already familiar with the metallurgy of copper. Only recently, thanks to archaeological discoveries accumulated since the nineteenth century, that one has advised that the nomads had perhaps developed another type of "civilization". We owe them such as the art of carpet, advances in techniques of horsemanship and weaponry, some decorative animal that influenced Roman art to the West. The imagination of the nomads scored their neighbors in Iran with the cycle of Rustam "the Sace" and probably in the West with some themes of the Arthurian legends inherited from Sarmatians by the Roman army stationed in England for second-fifth centuries. But from the last centuries BC, the nomadic Indo-European were dominant competitors in Asia and then gradually returned or the like, by people in majority or intensive Mongoloid, speaking for most languages of the family Altaic - Turkish, Mongolian and Tungus. A characteristic of nomadic societies is freedom or power, which are enjoyed by women. Sarmatians and Sarmatian in the Russian steppes, in some Sacae Asia, they could bear arms and fight like men and had important religious functions.
Kurgan: A Kurgan is a tumulus, in fact, it is a mound, or even an artificial hill left by the Neolithic people who lived between the V and the III century BC, which magnitude is proportional to the quality of the person buried in it in a tomb, often in these frozen regions of Siberia, and having thus escaped more than two thousand years to grave robbers.
Addendum: Amazing, the influence of art of the steppes in Assyrian art! You know that between 2008 and 2011 I painted a twenty paintings inspired by Babylonian Assyrian art !

Art criticism of Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret :
CHEVAL DE TENEBRE ET DE LUMIERE Le cheval est devenu la vie psychique des pulsions. Il est la fable humaine, le galop du monde, le bord des miasmes, quelque part entre solitude et liberté. Contre l'intégrité de l'étendue, le cheval impose soudain une configuration, un agglomérat. C’est l’amorce du seul récit. Celui qui transgresse l’ordre narratif des histoires et des lieux pour projeter en une sorte de limbe.
Restent des disjonctions au sein du corps de cheval : plus on va de haut en bas plus se fragmente et devient abstraction. Nos fantômes ne sont pas loin : restent des éboulis qui renvoient l’espérance habitable. Malgré tout.
La détermination du cheval en double résulte d’un choix bien plus que stylistique : c’est un foyer vital qui refuse toute neutralité au profit d'un engagement intime, essentiel. Surgit l’interaction sans ancrage temporel précis dans les reprises du temps et des archéologies.
Même s’il s’agit d’une scène-type le flottement demeure. Il est contextuel, consubstantiel à la peinture de Philhelm. C’est un récit et un constat où la qualité du noir qui environne les fragments de cheval borde sa présence infiniment lointaine et proche et dont l’impondérable prend des allures de symboles.
Le caractère rituel d’une telle séquence en vis à vis où la symétrie est contredite par les couleurs prend une valeur récursive compte tenu du monde inachevé de l’action de dévoration présentée. Cela ouvre l’œuvre à d’autres catégories discursives.
La diérèse dans son incertitude ne marque en réalité aucune évolution, aucune progression significative. Ce que le peintre montre possède la force qui taraude l’indémêlable sentiment de la solitude et de la présence, avers et revers d’une même médaille.
Le cheval dédoublé offre la révélation de toute sa présence qui emporte in fine sur toute velléité de fermeture. Par la faiblesse des repères temporels l’artiste déloge du registre aussi bien fictionnel que platement autobiographique.
C’est pourquoi sa subjectivité ne peut se regarder comme telle, mais plutôt comme une impression sensible que le spectateur fait sienne sans pour autant que celui-ci soit confronté et risque de tomber dans une peinture de type «moralisatrice ».
Un autre aspect intéressant du paradoxe de cette peinture tient au fait qu’elle n’expose pas celui qui la regarde à une sensation d’anonymat ou à un sentiment global d’abstraction. Il y a là une puissance émotionnelle qui cloue celui qui regarde à la plus forte des interrogations. Celle qui demeure ouverte le diptyque en fait foi - : il n’y a pas de réponse à la fable humaine. Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret