Interview with Raivis Zabis

Why did you become an art collector?

It wasn't an intentional choice; I myself sometimes wonder why. Hard to say in a few words, you have to dig deep into yourself. I was born in the town of Liepāja, on the Baltic Sea shore. I love the countryside, I love the house where my ancestors lived, and I love the simple and unpretentious life, wheat fields, pine forest, and our cold grey sea.

The sea was within reach and yet inaccessible. I grew up in the Soviet times and then the seashore was a border zone, it was fenced with barbed wire and guarded by border troops. We, village boys, were extremely attracted to this forbidden dream — the sea with an endless horizon. This feeling coupled with a desire to overcome boundaries and prohibitions would come back to me again and again in the course of my life. Any restrictions were perceived as a challenge and an incentive to act, to overcome; anything far and unknown became the most interesting and appealing.

After school, in the early 1990s, I went to study in Germany. I did not think of myself outside of agriculture at that time and chose an Agricultural University. Following my studies there, I returned to Latvia and worked in the agro sector for several years, but soon enough I started feeling myself short on space there. I lacked opportunities for action and decided to leave for Russia, which was bustling with perestroika.

I worked in St Petersburg, Russia for fifteen years. Saying that it was hard is not to say anything. The first years were particularly difficult, and I didn't have much time to care for the beauties of Northern Venice. With that, the feeling that I was close to the Great Beauty never left me from the very beginning. Do you remember The Great Beauty, a movie by Paolo Sorrentino? The movie is not really about that, but the title is spot on. For me, it echoed with the plight of my boyhood years: there was something beautiful and at the same time inaccessible nearby. When, after a couple of years of non-stop work race, I could already afford to have some time to spare on weekends, “the beautiful” became almost accessible, if not to mention long queues at the museum entrance on Sundays. But the queues only spurred my interest, and the fact that, once in the museum, I felt like a helpless kid thrown into the open sea, was my next challenge.

Is that when you realised you wanted to become an art collector?

Oh no, I would have to become an art historian then to rescue myself in this boundless sea! I don't remember exactly how it all evolved, but at a certain point I was able to put my finger on what exactly attracted and got me hooked. I was interested, before anything, in myself, that is, my reaction to these skilfully created pieces from the world of beauty. I liked some pieces and definitely detested others, and it felt as if I was exploring myself through them. And you know what, sometimes I appreciated artworks that were far from being beautiful, even ugly. One day I read the definition of art in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia: “Art is one of the ways of knowing the world”. It made me feel better, and I went on.

Where did you get the courage to dive straight into contemporary art rather than start cautiously with the classics?

I knew straight away that I would only collect contemporary art. I live in the present time, and I am interested in what my contemporaries do. For me, it's like “you can't go in the same water twice”; we are in the same boat with contemporary artists, and I'm interested in their vision of today’s world, their thoughts, the way they live and work. Then again, I have an opportunity to compare their vision with my own world-view.

How do you choose artworks?

The selection process is very important to me, and it is a pleasure in its own right. I enjoy visiting artists' workshops, looking around, talking to artists, and getting to know them. I might not be as much interested in the artwork itself, as in what's behind it — the personality of the artist, his or her story, view of the world, how they work, and what inspires them — that's what has always been important to me. One of my principles is that I never buy works by artists whose personalities I am not interested in or cannot relate to. Perhaps that's why, after ten years I’d been involved in art, I decided to make the first catalogue of my collection in 2015. There were fewer works then, just about a hundred. I intended to record and keep stories of the artists I met and the works I bought. Together with Inna Udovichenko, an art expert who had been helping me “stay on top” for several years at that time, we came up with the idea for the catalogue.

We didn't want to go the usual way and provide standard information about the artists, we also tried to avoid any sophisticated art articles or exhibition lists. Believe me, it wasn't easy, but we got all the artists to write down their own stories. We edited them a bit, of course, but never went beyond what artists said about themselves. To streamline the process, we asked everybody the same three questions: What do I want to tell about myself? How do I get inspired? What is my painting about? (the one purchased for the collection). The catalogue helped me draw some conclusions. At that moment, I became aware that I could no longer imagine my life without art, and also I realised that plain collecting was no longer enough for me. As it happens, you seem to have started to understand something, gained some experience and knowledge, but then you stumble on some small stone and realise that your knowledge will never be enough. As the classics teach us, “The more I know, the more I recognize I know nothing” or something along these lines.

Can we say that after the first stage of collecting was over, you changed your approach and decided to do it differently?

Yes, I suddenly realised that I had a collection. It was, you know, like a sense of responsibility. I took hold of what I believed were the best works, and it didn’t feel right that only my friend and I would see them. Visual art is called visual for a reason, it has to be seen, and it is certainly not meant to be locked in a storeroom or just to decorate walls of a living room. Art should stay in motion. I would even say that if art is alive, if it bears the trace of an artist’s soul, it creates movement around itself. Have you had a chance to watch camera footage from a good museum at high speed, seen those running streamlets of people in the mainstream flow?

Right, but quite often people walk past paintings, hardly ever linger, take a picture and run to the next one. What do you think of that?

Sure, some people confuse exhibitions with social media feeds, but that's normal. Perception process varies for everyone, young people absorb information at an incredible rate, and everyone takes as much as they can carry.

And you decided to take art to the masses?

It’s a pretentious thing to say, who knows what those mass needs are. From my experience, I know that in the arts environment one can and should act more on intuition; logic serves here worse than, say, in business. It’s not a calculated choice for me — whether to take art somewhere or take it nowhere — I just act according to the situation. Artists come to me, asking, for instance, to lend a painting for an exhibition or help with organisation; my art expert, Inna Udovichenko, also comes up with various creative ideas. As time goes by, I am seeing gradually increasing interest from exhibition promoters, business clubs, galleries and museums. Over the years, mostly in the last seven or eight years, we held more than twenty exhibitions featuring art pieces from my collection. It is also very important that we have made a good website (https://rzcollection.com/) where each artist is represented and where we publish materials about the exhibitions and promote our other projects. In 2018, the website won an award in the international Awwwards competition, and since then its traffic has been growing well.

What is your role in all this?

My role? I believe that before the interview we agreed that you would ask what role art played in my life? Well, work and family come first; art for me is definitely not a business or a financial investment. Of course, it is a popular form of investing, but I don't expect to live off art in my old age. My grandkids, though, will surely be the lucky ones! Agreed, my family doesn't always like the same paintings that I do, so we always have to compromise on what hangs in our home.

Believe me, art really gives me a lot of positivity and a good chance to interact with people. It gives me balance and an opportunity to switch between different activities all the time; you must have heard that it's good for keeping your brain active in the advanced years! I think we underestimate the influence of art on our lives. Maybe I am saying this now because once I used to attach less importance to art than, I am sure now, it deserves. I'll have to give it some more thought.

Sounds great, the way you cope with so many different areas of activity and succeed everywhere is enviable in a good way. However, you still avoided answering my question.

Do you want to know what my role in art is? My role in art, let me figure it out now. I am an observer. I like to observe everything that happens around art, I like to watch the process of making art, people's reactions to art; what interests me the most, is the way art affects people. It's like with a stone thrown into the water, circles start at one point and spread out all over the surface, and the effect is amazing. Do you remember the exhibition of the Cuban artist Ítalo René Expósito in the Liepāja Museum, which made a lot of noise? There was so much controversy about it. I'm glad that art and freedom prevailed then, and the exhibition was not thrown out of the museum by the opposing tidal wave.

Granted, the power of art is not an easy challenge. I remember this exhibition; it was then talked about not only in Liepāja, but also in Riga and all over Latvia. Have you often seen a negative reaction to contemporary art?

It's not quite relevant what kind of reaction it is as long as there is a reaction. That’s what really matters. I mentioned earlier that I was curious to see my own reaction to art, but that was just the beginning; very soon, I became much more interested in observing other people's reactions. To be honest, I wasn't as too keen on the judgement of art critics and other professionals in the field, I wanted to know the opinion and see the reaction of people who were not into art.

I have a diptych in my collection, Stairs by Nadezhda Anfalova. One morning I brought these two canvases to my office and hung them in the meeting room. From then on, Stairs were the traditional companion of any of our business negotiations. The flight of steps allows you to think, for example, about your aspirations and achievements in business and career, and on a different note, may hint at setbacks, a downslope.

It is an exciting example, and I’ve literally felt on a physical level how powerful this visual image is, and how many underlying meanings it can convey.

People feel this very well because we read visual codes non-verbally, we perceive them primarily on a subconscious level, and the logical mind is not of much help here. Why else do I always advocate having paintings in an office? At a place where pragmatism and logic go off-scale, there has to be, as I call it jokingly, a “corner of divergent thinking”. In addition, you shouldn't display classics there either; on the contrary, something modern, which creates an atmosphere of freedom and helps thinking outside the box. I have lent and am ready to lend my paintings out for a while so that people can see how a good art piece in the office, apart from trimming up the place, also affects people, facilitates communication, and contributes to the entire work process as a whole.

That is, art has begun to fill all areas of your life, not only your home, but also your office, right?

Yes, and it’s a past stage, art is moving on.

What else can you think of? Let me guess, have you opened a gallery? Have you started painting?

I’ve had my eyes on a good place in old Riga, I have done some exhibition projects, but a gallery has to be an efficient business, and I don't feel that's my thing. So far, art for me is mainly a kind of experiment, a creative hobby, rather than a business that requires a sound economic foundation.

I didn't start painting either; I think that would have been trivial. Too many people paint pictures these days, while being a real artist is a vocation. I did something different though, I let artists into my house, and I used my old family farm to set up a residency for creative people. Now I don't need to go to artists’ workshops looking for art, it is being born right at my place.

Very interesting, please tell me more about it! What were your goals when you created the residency? How do you see its mission?

Mission is a meaningful word. I’d rather speak about the mission of art and the mission of collecting. There's an opinion that collecting is just a kind of manifestation of the natural possessive instinct: when I see something beautiful, I take it. There is surely something to it. Yet, art has long ceased to be beautiful; it doesn’t look like fine art anymore. I find it very strange to be hearing that art should please the eye and bring joy and pleasure. Art has a right to be diverse; it may be grotesque, frightening, repulsive, but it does not make it less art.

Art is no longer a reflection of one part of life; it is increasingly becoming a representation of life in its fullness and depth. In the Russian language, the word painting is a combination of two roots, life and to paint, which I think is a good definition of the mission of painting and art in general. Look at how you live and what you live by and do not blame artists if you don’t like what you see: art is just a mirror. What is the mission of a mirror? Probably to let us see and know ourselves.

At some point, having returned home to Latvia, I wanted, as I then thought, to learn to understand art. But now I would put it differently, I wanted to learn life, to understand it better. I didn't want to dive into the theory and philosophy of art, although you can't do without it either. If you want to learn something about life, you have to find out what other people think about it. But I was interested not only and not so much in the classics, I was much more concerned in my contemporaries, those with whom I could talk about things that mattered to me.

Back to residency though. When you are lucky enough to have friends, including many creative people and artists, you invite them to your place. It just happened, everything worked itself out even before I realised that there was a special name for what I did — a residency for artists.

What would be your main message to the reader of the catalogue?

If there is something in your life that you do eagerly, your life becomes full of adventures — you develop, move forward, you feel alive. Each of us is unique and has amazing abilities and talents. Everyone has his own vision of the world, his own interpretation of events, and by exploring and living our lives; we create our own version of reality, our own unique painting. The more active and intense life we live, the deeper is our awareness of how we create our own life, and the more responsible we are for everything around. Life is an exciting journey into the unknown.

We have a traditional question: what type of collector are you: a trophy hunter, an entrepreneur, an expert or an aesthete?

Research aesthete. I am definitely not a pure aesthete. My collection gives me aesthetic pleasure, but what really matters to me is keeping up with the times, staying abreast of developments in the world of art and science and following up the younger generation trends. I am a collector who could quote Camus on “the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent”, a collector for whom advancement and observation are the essence of life.