Guram Tsibakhashvili's series "Masks" concerns constantly actual problem - people and masks or people with masks - in the Art once more from different point of view. The author fits to personages of his at most documentary photos different types of masks made of unusual material and through them creates unexpected effects, some dissonance in specially created documentalism. He turns common everyday environment, serious poses taken for shooting into exaggerated absurd forms and transfers the problem into other register. He starts to talk about invisible, but constantly existing masks.Guram Tsibakhashvili selects his photo heroes spontaneously. Physical features or social status means nothing for him. He accentuates synthesis of a person and, in this case, already visible masks and reinforces importance of the synthesis by non-existence of uncommon artistic means characteristic for him: he uses at most specificity of photography - as accurate describer and does not interfere or touch photos shot mainly in interior, in studio environment, but merely fixes them with extreme punctuality. However, such effect of "non-interference" is primary and seeming, as Guram Tsibakhashvili in fact shots invisible masks, layers hidden beyond a person. All people fit these masks some time in order not to be rejected by the society and to gain the right of existence from already masked mass of people. However the photo camera is not able to fix them, on the contrary, on the good photo we perceive personages without masks, in real form. It seems therefore that the author offers a simple game and characters and hides them with common and sometimes with uncommon objects. He creates masked hybrids instead of persons and presents problems of distorted constraint faces openly, without any artistic embelishment and casts them to you, as the member of the society or one of those, who live with masks fitted conveniently and who force others to live with masks. All this is just as tragically unnatural in reality, as Guram Tsibakhashvili's personages' faces covered with gauzy socks, gas-masks or pink spectacles. However the masks may have the function of a third eye and make you perceive the boring monotonous world from the mystic point of view.Consequently, Guram Tsibakhashvili's creative work is not radically monosemantic either on this occasion, he investigates different points of the problem and the author along with its own mask - photocamera on his face, reminds us things that we forget too frequently - that people have the right to live with masks, people have the right to live without masks, people have the right to play, and, in all, people have the right...

Natia Tsulukidze                                                        POSTCARD