Labas Alexander A.
(1900-1983)

"We Labasa eye is sensitive to the unusual" - wrote about him one of the critics. In fact it is a very precise definition of the essence of his work. Not only to see the unusual, often new, previously unheard of in my life, but also to make the viewer experience it as a miracle, to experience for yourself. It is this desire has led quite a young artist in the group of artists and innovators, founded in 1925, OCT.

Most of them had just graduated from Higher Art - Art Institute of a new, innovative nature, too. The chairman was elected teacher of many of them - D. P. Schr . Labas also studied after SHPU (1912-17) in GSHM (1918-19), and reared them from the Higher Art (1921-24), which was then allowed to teach painting.

The word "easel" in the name of society and meant the desire to engage the visual arts, in particular - in painting, but do not go into the "production of things" (as called for by the Constructivists then artists). But this painting, not outwardly, but inside reflecting life in front of me, was strongly renewed, to find a new, sharp tongue, corresponding to the spirit and intent of these changes. Movement, speed ... How to transfer this experience in the fixed painting? How to express the feeling of flying, heights, shaky emptiness behind the thin walls of an airplane cabin?

Labas barely outlines this dangling in the infinity of the cabin, as if a section - with passengers sitting quietly on an almost invisible support; just guessed and wings melted into a golden haze ("In the airplane cabin," 1928). The artist depicts not the mechanics, but the miracle of flight. He is looking for the exact rhythm of the train speed of the smear deliquescent landscape, and again - with the colored specks passengers safely cut across the car ("Ride", 1928).

He writes without end locomotives, airplanes, airships, ignoring the technical details, but the feeling of catching a novelty, mobility and unusual points of view on things - from the bottom up or from the top, from the height of flight. As the world he depicts his painting itself is easy, mobile, sometimes vague, is not directed to the subject, and the feelings that it arouses. He says the city stretching into the heavens floors of houses, busy with people rushing in all directions tram, cab drivers, cars ("Town Square", 1926). Writes endlessly flowing up and down through a giant pipe band escalators ...

Late 1920s - early 1930s. - Take off creativity Labasa, when the feeling of greed and diversity of life he had the most organic. Then he smoothed out a lot. But the sense of elegant and joyous lightness, beauty, life, the artist conveyed to his later years, to make it a light and bright watercolors, painted in the Crimea, in the Baltic, in the suburbs.