ANA KORDZAIA-SAMADASHVILI ON SERAPION VATSADZE

I have heard that once, in some distant and forgotten past, when manuscripts were highly valued, scribes and painters would inscribe and paint over the work of others, making it their own - and thus palimpsests were created. I have thought about this a great deal, or perhaps dreamed about it - I am not sure what to call it - but it was a deeply pleasurable kind of thought, or dream.

There is something very pleasurable in thinking about a dialogue one has only half-heard or half-seen - you do not know its beginning or its end, and you are free to imagine whatever you wish: an adventure, a mystery, a love story.

Verso of Serapion Vatsadze’s artwork.

Photo Curtesy: Vernissage Gallery.

I have heard that nothing ever truly disappears, nothing is ever lost - that somewhere, sometime, what someone like me, or perhaps someone better than me, has created will inevitably resurface. Even if it has been covered over by another’s work, even if only a fragment of their thought can be glimpsed, it has not vanished. That someone - like me, or better than me - remains, and one may think about them endlessly. One may think about how these seemingly useless, unimportant words were once someone’s thoughts - someone wrote them, someone spoke them, and someone believed them to be deeply moving - someone like me, or better than me.

Frontal view of Vatsadze’s artwork.

Photo Curtesy: Vernissage Gallery.

I too have heard these words once, long ago, in some old film, and I have seen those people as well - embodied, flickering on a black-and-white screen. And yet I cannot tell who said what, who was who - I do not remember, and perhaps it is right that I do not.

What matters is that I love these words - and the women and men who stand, sit, rejoice, and grieve upon those very sheets once deemed useless. And I can think, at length and with great pleasure, about what those sheets might be: a palimpsest, or simply a joke.

ANA KORDZAIA-SAMADASHVILI