Anya Lauchlan

UT PICTURA POESIS : ''Comparisons between poetry and painting go back a long way. “Ut pictura poesis (As is painting, so is poetry),” wrote Latin lyric poet Horace (65-8 b.c.) in his epistle Ars Poetica....'' by Brian Fitzgerald

Ut Pictura Poesis, an international group of visual artists and sculptors, was founded by two Parisian artists Concha Beneditto and Klara Beer in 2000. Over the years, exhibitions organised by the group have taken place in many European cities, including Paris and London.

The six paintings shown here were exhibited at the Ut Pictura Poesis shows in Paris (at the Marie of the 8th. Arrondisement in 2000) and in London ( Leighton House Museum & Gallery, Kensington, in 2001).

These paintings were inspired by the tragedy of the on-going war in Chechnya, my grandfather Akhmetkhan Mutushev's native land. He was a barrister, a poet and a political leader of Chechnya (Ichkeria) just before the Russian revolution and the following civil war overturned the liberal regime of his government and installed the centralised soviet regime in 1918. As many liberals, he hoped that this would bring internationalist connections with more freedom for his people, sadly, history proved the opposite: he was arrested and, eventually, died in one of the hardest Gulag's camp in Magadan (Siberia), in 1942, he was sixty five, after the mental and physical tortures he endured over the twenty years spent in the camps and prisons. He has never seen his little granddaughter but he wrote lovely poems for her. His people were deported from their homes, in cattle tracks, from Caucasus to Kazakhstan, thrown out into the snow, deep up to the waist level of the tallest man, in February 1944, - 70% of the exiled, mainly women, children, and elderly died during the transit and the first year, of cold, starvation and typhoid fever.

Those who survived, like our strong uncle, came back, a few years after Stalin's death, by 1959, and started from scratch, - only to be invaded again in the 1993 by the Yeltsin's army. The war took at least 250,000 lives from a one million population, a quarter, the estimated number of the children killed raises over 60,000. The country is virtually destroyed, the new government was installed by Russian force, the war and the civil war still continue. It is difficult to describe how I feel, I have lost several relatives in the recent war, - Le Bateau Ivre, (a Drunken Ship) poem by Arture Rimbaud, felt appropriate, - this set was inspired by this poem and by the war.

'The Exile of the Black Unicorn' - is a triptych based on the more specific events of the Chechens' history, far too sad to describe, - a tragedy of the indigenous small nation,- an ethnocide, a genocide in Europe, with the European Union looking on but not quite seeing it.