Overview

THE MAN Zanis Waldheims (1909-1993) was born in Jaunpils in Latvia, a small country from the north of Eastern Europe. At the end of the Second World War, he found himself, in 1945, in a refugee camp in Bamberg in Germany, then becomes a worker in France in 1949. The Yalta Conference of February 1945 which dispose of his country and many others to the communist regime of Moscow leave, to this qualified lawyer, an extremely sour taste which he will never recover totally, so absurd and incomprehensible the act of the Westerners seems to him during this historic event. In 1952, at 43 years old, he decides to emigrate to Canada. He settled in Montreal where he is hired as a manoeuvre in a warehouse. He then pushed himself entirely in the writing of a book, to denounce the post-war unfairness lived by his Latvian fellow countrymen and himself, also by the other people that have all dove in horror. He frequently gets to the Montreal city's library where he goes through hundreds of volumes as he is searching a sense to his broken life. Through his readings, he coincidently fell on the idea of the creation of a map for the human orientation (la creation d'une carte pour l'orientation humaine) of the Age of Enlightenment's French philosopher Maine de Biran. It's, however, to that map instead of his book that he now dedicates the rest of his life. His quest of meaning leads him, in 1958, to the beginnings of an abstract and geometrical art and, on a period of thirty years, to the production of approximately six hundred original works. After a few serious but unsuccessful attempts with the objective to make his art and ideas known, he withdraws into himself. Despite everything he doesn't give up. Inspired by his map for the human orientation, he begins, in 1961, the writing of a theory about his ideas of geometric abstraction. Despite the fact that his works are undeniably beautiful, he doesn't sell a single one, as if they were part of a great history book from which we do not take the pages apart, and his theory, completed in 1970, will never be published. He dies in 1993 completely unknown from the public in spite of the exhibitions which took place in Lachine in 1976 and 1992, in Mount St-Hilaire in 1981, in Montreal in 1983 and 1992. Recently, following Yves Jeanson's initiative, his work and ideas are displayed anew in Scottsdale in 2006, in Chicago in 2008, in Dresden in 2010, in Orillia, in Montreal and in Toronto in 2012 and in Riga, Latvia's capital, in 2013. HIS APPROACH That's from a strong intuition, nourished by his numerous readings in pure and human sciences fields, that Waldheims searches to oversimplify the ideas or concepts of the scientific authors he reads. It is then to the sentences' content and structure, which attempt to explain nature and human, that he harms himself at the origin of his quest of sense. His archives and the five hundred books in his library give evidence to that abstract and geometric schematism. Furthermore, he develops a metalanguage quite quickly. Many concepts will be then oversimplified in a structure in which, instinctively, the axis and Cartesian quadrants, as primary geometric shapes will be elements of his abstract and geometric language. Amongst them could be found and illustrated, for example, concepts of conscious, subconscious and unconscious from the field of contemporary psychology; space-time, matter-energy, levels of potential from modern sciences field; plan and elevation views from the domain of architecture. Adding to it comes the colour, all in nuances and shade, to embellish and give a soul to the works. The medium that better suits his artistic an intellectual activity is colour pencil on white cardboard of about 700 mm square. As from 1980, he converted his works in three dimensions and bas-relief

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