Alexander Florensky

BATUMI PAINTINGS

My great-grandfather Alexander Ivanovich Florensky has lived his whole life in Georgia. He was a road engineer and has built many roads and bridges. In the mid-1880s, he lived with his family in Batumi, while he was building the Batumi-Akhaltsikhe road, which we use to this days (even now in the village of Adzharitskhali you can see the steel bridge he built, that is miraculously preserved since then). After the construction of the road, his family moved to Tbilisi. More of this can be found in the memoirs of the childhood of Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky, my grandfather's elder brother.

In 2008, I have decided to live between St. Petersburg and Georgia, and it has been exactly 10 years now that I live and work in Tbilisi for several months a year. In 2016, I bought a small apartment in Batumi and now I live in three beautiful cities, periodically moving between them.

I started making paintings about Batumi back in 2009, while my very first visit to Ajaria with the artist Ushangi Khumarashvili, later in 2011, I organized a long creative trip to Batumi with the local artists - Tutu Kiladze and Tinatin Chkhikvishvili. And since then every year I have come here in search of the new subjects for my works. 

For several years, I used to take all my art works to St.Petersburg, but four years ago, I decided that everything I painted in Georgia should have remained in this country. Thus, this exhibition presents only the paintings drawn in 2014-2017.

My favourite thing to do in Batumi is to observe the life in the port, the movement of all these boats, tugboats, ferries, tankers and dry cargo ships. Therefore, most of my pictures depict all these "floating objects", a pier with a lighthouse and fishermen sitting along the quay. It seems to me that I can paint all this endlessly.