What was it?

On Saturdays, we would have coffee and éclairs at Entrée, our favourite café not far from Nevsky Avenue. We’d discuss the latest news from the art world and then call at a studio of one of the artists we knew. A lot has changed since then: Raivis returned to Latvia in 2018, the café closed during the pandemic, but we go on calling Saturday the éclair day between us.

Today, as we look back at the journey we have made, we seem to gain a new understanding of ourselves and we keep wondering at what’s been happening to us and to art in general. In 2023, counting from the very first acquisitions, the Raivis collection will turn 18, the age of maturity. We never, were it at the beginning or along the way, thought about any strategic goals or objectives. We just looked around, discussed things, argued, and made mistakes. It was not easy at times, but we would never let ourselves be stopped by the great physical, emotional and material cost. Why did we do this?

To be honest, eighteen years ago, I had virtually no experience working with contemporary art. The St Petersburg Academy of Arts, with all respect and gratitude to my alma mater, had little to offer me in this field. Before graduating from the Academy in 2006, I used to work as a lawyer. After fifteen years of building a career and making money, all I wanted was to just start living. Raivis was similarly far from any business agenda; art was a favourite hobby for him, a space for emotional relaxation and recharging. 

How did we choose a course in the boundless ocean of art? Raivis said in his interview that he thought of himself as both a researcher and collector. I totally agree, we were not too keen on painters who had already gained some recognition, and whose works could most often be found in museums and galleries in our city. We looked wider, we went to artists’ studios in search of variety and novelty.

The selection criteria were formed gradually, and quite often, the novice collector opposed recommendations of art experts in favour of his own choice. Still, we essentially shared the same opinion and were mostly guided by the aesthetics of visual expression of an artwork. We were not much interested in works that required additional verbal information to reveal their profound meaning. A talented artist can present any object as a work of art and choose a variety of art forms to do so. But, as the collection owner has strong personal preference for pictorial forms, the RZ Collection consists mostly of contemporary paintings.

The first catalogue of the RZ Collection that we published in March 2015 included paintings by sixteen artists. Over the past seven years, the collection has grown considerably and by September 2022, we have already worked with more than fifty artists. When preparing a new catalogue we wanted to take a wider approach and realized that the standard information about the artists and paintings provided in the first edition was no longer sufficient. As Raivis said in his interview, “art creates movement”, and this movement has become something of an independent subject of our attention and interest. A wide range of articles revealing the history of the creation and movement of the collection makes our catalogue more of a guidebook. We believe that the title of the publication, The Ripple Effect of Art, is the most appropriate and does a better job in explaining the essence of the processes taking place around us.

Tsunami

Cuban art first came to our attention in 2009. My quest of diversity and novelty took me to the Tenth Havana Biennale of Contemporary Art. What I saw there surpassed my expectations —an undiscovered world of art, surprisingly rich in talent, opened up to me. My colleagues and I were genuinely thrilled with the Tsunami installation by Cuban artist Humberto Díaz. With Raivis’s consent, I invited Humberto to come and set up his installation in St Petersburg.

Personally, I can think of nothing as impressive as our Tsunami that unfolded in the advance hall of the Manège Central Exhibition Hall in St Petersburg. It was an amazing installation in terms of its proportions, complexity of making, and power of inspiration that made it possible to create the huge wave of ceramic tiles. Also, it meant a lot to me that we happened to have matching views with Raivis on contemporary Cuban art. Paintings by Cuban artists form a significant part of the RZ Collection and remain in favour to this day. You can read more about the Tsunami project and Cuban art in my article Tsunami and in the article Phenomenon of Cuban Art by Cuban art historian Gabriela Hernández Brito.

God. Love. Cuba

Another vivid impression we got in Havana was the work of the young Cuban painter Ítalo René Eхpósito. His paintings were very quickly picked up by buyers from the studio, so we agreed with him on a series of new large works for a solo exhibition. Ítalo was happy, he said he had long dreamt of making a few paintings on a very important subject for him — what is love?

Ítalo's paintings were gladly welcomed at one of Riga's oldest galleries Pegazs by the owner Liga Sane and renowned art expert Sarmite Sile. Their highly professional and thoughtful approach contributed a lot to the success of the exhibition that aroused intense interest and discussion. You can read Sarmite Sile's article God. Love. Cuba about Ítalo's works. The next exhibition took place in the City Museum of Liepāja. It was a smaller town, not like a capital city that had seen it all. The public there was more diverse and not as seasoned, and the exhibition was met with mixed reception. At one point, we even encountered a strong negative reaction from the Protestant community. You can find out more about the exhibition in an article Closing the Circle by art critic and theologian Elena Bulgakova-Leskova.

Richard Wagner

When we met the artist Viktor Vasiliev, we found out that he and Raivis came from the same place, both were born in Liepāja. Viktor was a historian by training and a great storyteller. He had been painting for as long as he remembered himself, but only after his career in big business was done with, he was able to fully apply himself to art. We loved visiting his studio. On one of our regular visits, he surprised us with canvases, as he put it, with “Wagner's music painted and still wet”. Listening to music and looking at music-inspired paintings was just wonderful, like being in a dream that came true.

Soon Vyacheslav Vlasov, a writer, and Anton Boldyrev, a musician and composer, joined us in this dream. You can read more about this in Vyacheslav's article Inspired by Wagner.

In Endless Motion

In 2017, the Erarta Museum of Modern Art invited us to make an exhibition of paintings from the RZ Collection. We were interested in showing Latvian contemporary art in St Petersburg. It was also an incentive to get up to date on Latvian modern art, especially as Raivis was about to return home soon.

Raivis chose artists entirely on his own; he only occasionally used my advice or followed recommendations of Latvian art critics. One day I figured out how I could help him with this. I suggested asking artists about which of the Latvian classics they would choose as their teacher. Look at what inspires them and find out who they are, and that is how we did it. For the exhibition, we suggested that the artists should make replicas of paintings by their favourite “teachers”. You can read about the exhibition In Endless Motion and how painting inspires painting in the article Long Live Painting by art critic Maija Rudovska.

Past and Future Indefinite

I never had any doubts that the RZ Collection would continue to grow regardless of where the collector was located, but I could hardly anticipate just how quickly things would develop. Raivis returned to Riga at the end of 2018, and as soon as in 2019, he was offered to make an exhibition in Liepāja, at the Lielais Dzintars (Great Amber) Concert and Exhibition Hall.

Choosing the concept for a large exhibition in Raivis' hometown was a very interesting and demanding task. The world at that moment looked stable and prosperous, brimming with movement and positive energy. We rejoiced at past successes and made plans for the new exhibition. There was a feeling of confidence and a desire to move forward, and whatever difficulties might have occurred only spurred our interest and inspired us.

I cannot remember exactly why we finally decided on the title Past and Future Indefinite. I think we just casually came across the name while discussing. As time has passed, now that the horsemen of the apocalypse have appeared in our reality, the choice of topic no longer seems so random. You can learn about how the artists and ourselves saw the past and the future in late 2019 and early 2020 from my article on the exhibition Past and Future Indefinite.

House By the Sea

The residency for artists came into our lives gradually, starting in 2017. In his interview, Raivis rightly pointed out that the residency came about because there was a house and there were artist friends. There also appeared a certain order or modus operandi of the residency, as a kind of complex summation of all the factors of existence.

The residency for artists House by the Sea is located on the Baltic coast, in a remote place away from civilisation, on the grounds of an old noble estate dating back to the early XIXth century. We tend to invite two or three artists who do not know each other to stay over at the residency at the same time. The intention is to allow the invited artists, while making the most of their individual potential, to work side by side in collaboration and discussion. To encourage an active and rewarding interaction, we usually suggest that participants prepare and make a joint exhibition.

We would like to believe that no artist has left the House by the Sea dissatisfied with his creative endeavour there. Perhaps, there were some who were not so fortunate to get as much inspiration as they might have hoped for. But it’s beyond doubt that many wonderful works have been created there, including those that were presented at the Searching for Freedom exhibition in the City Museum of Liepaja. Read more about the creative work at the residence and subsequent exhibitions in my article Searching For Freedom and in the article Leaving the Farmstead by Linda Kilevica.

Story of the House by the Sea

In 2020, we expected the artist Viktor Vasiliev, the same historian who created the well-known series of paintings inspired by the music of Wagner, to come to stay at the residency. As we all know so well now, the future is too uncertain. And at the time of global isolation, we had no choice but to follow the conclusions we drew from the Past and Future Indefinite project.

No matter what was happening around, we tried to remain ourselves. We did what we could do, holding back from constructing a future. We only observed the present and how it developed and transformed. Viktor Vasiliev and another artist Anastasia Kirillova (who is also a historian by training) researched the history of the house by the sea and its ex-owners from all available sources, and set about painting it despite being thousands of kilometres away from the cherished place.

The House by the Sea art and history project is running on right now. I believe you can dream in the present, no harm in doing that, and we want to share our dream with you. We dream of a small museum in one of the rooms of the house by the sea, where the history of this beautiful place will come to life in the paintings of contemporary artists.

Inspiration

I would like to conclude by answering the question posed in the title of this article: “What was it?” What has been driving us all these years? We couldn’t find a better answer than inspiration. Artists, “servants of inspiration” according to one poet, create their work and send it out into the world so that their energy carries over to the audience and inspires them to create. Inspiration is a powerful constructive force through which our universe was undoubtedly created. 

We asked each of our artists one question: What is inspiration for you? Their answers can be found in the article On Inspiration. I hope that their sincere stories will be a fascinating and inspiring read for you.