Jaba Mamamtavrishvili

Jaba Mamamtavrishvili is a painter from Georgia, now living and working in Princeton, NJ.
A canvas, for him, is a way of stepping out of the room he is standing in and into a place that exists only in his imagination — a landscape half-remembered and half-invented, reached with a brush instead of a plane ticket. It is the closest thing he has found to teleportation: he disappears into the painting while he makes it, and comes back hours later.
Nature is where those journeys almost always land. He works in oil on canvas, building thick worked surfaces and thin transparent layers. He isn’t copying a place so much as building one, close enough to the real world that you believe it, strange enough that you know you’ve never been.

He has already crossed one real distance, from Georgia to the United States. The paintings keep crossing others. What he wants is simple — that whoever stands in front of one travels a little way too.