On this field,
(about the recent paintings - 2015-2023)
Luckily, the conceptually chromatic moment of today spares openings to the vast territories of timeless aesthetics, where beauty, outlined in its bare simplicity resides - 'ist aufgehoben'.
'Luckily', because, it (this very dominant conceptually-chromatic-moment-of-today) is effectively used to ensure and empower a steady proliferation of mortifying political commissions and pernicious institutional guidelines.
At some point, I felt I would really enjoy different nutritious links and maybe even some other artistic habitat to try to resist the allocation of an unpleasantly subordinate place within the system. So, I thought, I'd rather turn my gaze toward those 'openings'. This is how I picked up painting as a form of visibility that can disclose an artistic practice and started to exercise in its old lovely vocation - create long-lasting objects with their own appearances. My heart found a new home and my artistic product - a sensibility, which I would describe as 'low contemporary'.
Crooning out the very first ideas for a very first painting already was like a dehiscence of an overaged form releasing seeds of needed gimmicks (some transgressional artist tools) to gradually grow into excitingly eclectic research and decision-making patterns.
In this painting project I brought together casual excellence of different languages in a customized modernistic arrangement. Each painting is an episode of a trans-territorial drift over the fields of different ways of painting. The drift, which offered me an opportunity to liberate my own raw genealogical self and (re)arrange, (re)situate and (re)record the additional elements to authentic me as they were gradually surfacing up on the way.
Prioritizing the aspects of authenticity landed me at a considerable distance from the loud artifices of transient and fleeting, overblown conceptual adornments of the mainstream hot central playgrounds of Contemporary Art. It was a natural choice to place the emphasis on the essential and not on the momentary wow-and-dazzle elements, so that pieces would speak for themselves quietly and open to the full extent to those who can be delighted with the minimal amount of embellishment.
The initial step is a movement of colour released by a picked out image or feeling, which triggers the choice of a motive. There is never much sense in the beginning. Fuller movements show up, as sensations like warmth, lightness, contrast, 'sound' start to acquire volumes. These paintings are figurative fictions. They do not put forth illusions, and they also don't explain the 'truth' of what they display, they are free from the tasks of representing, expressing, symbolizing, or stating something and they don't look for a place under some conceptual umbrella. Their dialectic is to succeed in elaborating arrangements of different painterly actions to acquire intelligible structure of what they want to be, especially when the disincorporation from the actual discourses of the actual art system is inevitable and the only materiality left to support them is the one of their own.
Each painting unfolds in a number of object-signs deployed in various visual codes and languages, which eventually lock in on one central sign. However, it does not summon a co-existence of meanings. It is rather an overcrossing, or a dissemination after an explosion. Interestingly, it allows an observation of a reverse movement, the one of an implosion, forming a hermetically closed space with a center.
Generally, this painting project can be typified by the characteristically free use of the expert craftsmanship and by putting a dramatic spin on timeless aesthetic parameters, moving into the grounds, where the pleasure of having a painterly work done slowly, manually resides: enjoying putting a thin layer of paint, or, a thick layer of paint; having a cutting line, or a hardly recognizable one; having a pleasure of creating an off-white field with a solid depth by mixing cobalt green with cadmium red into an airy brown and putting it under a layer of white. Certainly, maintaining a continuous sensual and intellectual touch within a longterm relationship with the painting is essential. And certainly, The Pleasure lies in almost tactile perception of the surface of the painting and of all what is (and what is not) happening there.
The sign of heart in some of the paintings is used only because as an object it does not exist in real, but has a volume and a form that can cast a shadow.
These paintings are studies. They have been worked on at different timelines, with significant pauses. They are similar to "partituras", and are longing to be performed in different sizes as well as in different value systems.
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The current working titles are:
"Studien zu Thema "Aufheben";
"Throwing the balls to the guys in the swimming pools";
and
"Fountains".
All three serve as a vessel to deliver the chosen values providing an exciting and at the same time comfortable way to approach and handle any thematic material.
the pictures below:
1. "(creation,salvation,and)Unsavable." (developed together with my son, Serge) Oil on canvas. 50x60cm. 2013.
2. "Place for waiting for someone like Godo." Oil on canvas. 76x63cm. 2015.
3. "Suspended." Oil on canvas. 100x70cm. 2017.
4. "Fountain#2." Oil on canvas. 80x100cm. 2014.
5. "Splash(- Goodnight dancer. - Goodnight princess)." Oil on canvas. 60x55cm. 2018.
6. "Throwing the balls to the guys in the swimming pools."(two guys)". Oil on canvas. 50cmx50cm. 2016.
7. Study for the "Flight to Cythera." Oil on canvas. 50x50cm. 2017-2019
8.9. "Portrait of an unknown hero" (Serge). Oil on canvas. 74cmx54cm. 2018.
10. "Dandallions". Oil on canvas. 130cmx150cm. in work.
11. preparatory drawing for a double-portrait. "Sophie&Susan".
12. "Sophie&Susan." Oil on canvas. in work.
"I would also say about these paintings the following:"
would say Panurge
or, would have had written François Rabelais.
sign system can be divided into several major components: A-figurative; B-objectlike; C-The sculptural; D-color-field; and E-ephemeral signs, listed from the larger ones to smaller ones. But in real, these major divisions are subdivided into thousands of individual small signs. The E-signs are small and thin and difficult to see, while the A, B, and C signs are big and broad and easily visible. The large gaps that sometimes appear between the A signs and the B signs do not form a category of a sign and remain just as a gap - some kind of division between the two. All signs are orbiting the main, central sign, but some signs can be seen as some sort of satellites around the main sign which stand out insofar as they act as a source of other signs - these satellite signs create necessities to have their own signs, and they feed this category of signs so that they are formed out of residues of the satellite signs themselves or of the main sign.
Media performance: "You are helpless, or, all in all it does not seem so bad." 1994 Contemporary Art Center. Moscow.
"You are helpless or All in all it does not seem so bad." was a live production of a 35min. long informational/analytical television programme in a studio, built up specially for this purpose in the exhibition space of the Contemporary Art Centre in Moscow, with simultaneous consumption of the produced information by the viewer/audience. The divided into two parts space of the CAC was saturated with video equipment which included: a real television bus with all the editing facilities parked outside by the entrance of CAC, and a studio setting in the right side rooms of the CAC inner space and three mobile studio cameras which covered the whole space.The produced material was presented through several monitors and an on-wall projection in the rooms on the left side of the CAC inner space. The performance started with a 30min. non-stop television advertisements usually broadcasted by the Russian state television company, after which came the programme. The programme presented the artworld information, about real people, covered the events and gave evaluations of the state of affairs of the Moscow art scene, and did all this in a quite vulgar and carelessly manipulative way.
Several live interviews, included into the programme, were cut by the editor soon after start and were followed by summaries in which the authentic material of the interviews was disrespectfully misused. All this was done in the presence of the subjects of the information, who found themselves in a position of helplessness and could do nothing against these violent distortions. In another part of the programme a pre-recorded episode was channelled through the monitors and the projection, where a naked woman made her way toward the bed in one of the two rooms in the left side of the space. The people who watched the scene in the monitors in other rooms rushed into the one with the bed looking for something to see, while those who were in the room where the bed was and saw that the transmission was not live stayed calm and quiet. Thus two different behaviours were modelled, caused by two different perceptions of one and the same information.In General, the performance was entertainingly charged with expectations of voyeuristic nature mixed with uncanny confusing experiences of being entrapped in dual state of a spectator and a protagonist at the same time.
Selected video installations
"Did you colonise the time, or, is it me who is so slow". is a two-channell video installation. Realised for and first shown in the exhibition "L'autre moitié de l'Europe." Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume. Paris in 2000.
Each channel shows a video portrait of me: one full-figure seated in a chair; and another - head and shoulders. Each portrait was filmed during one hour. Afterwords one hour long shot of each portrait was accelerated three times, so that they became 20 min. long. Then again three times - to become 6,5 min. long. and so on till they were squeezed into the time period of 1 second. All the accelerations were put together and projected on one 15m long video projection screen which was streched from wall to wall in the room so that it formed a sharp angle directed toward an entrance into the space. The viewer who entered the space was finding himself/herself very close to the projections. The installation also included a black&white ink-jet print (of a plate left dirty after eating a portion of pasta) on the silver fold (round, 82cm in diameter), which hung on the wall and served as a mirror service where, when one stood in front of it, one could see himself/herself with my accelerated video portrait tin the background, where one would see himself/herself as a master of his/her time and accelerated me, in motion resembling convulsions.
The video installation "You are not watched". was realized for and first shown in the exhibition "Identity - Selfhood" at the "Atheneum", Musuem of contemporary art in Helsinki, Finland, in 1994.
It is a four channel video installation. Each channel shows a pair of eyes, a gaze. Four pairs of eyes are filmed during three minutes according to a very precise script, so that they all look at one and the same thing at the same time and thus build a closed circuit of communication between them, from which a visitor is excluded. The channels are synchronized so that all four pairs of eyes are reacting simultaneously e.g. to a (imaginary) visitor entering the room from the left side entrance and then following the visitor to the center of the room, or, sometimes they look at each other.
The installation is made in not brightly lit room and includes an ambient sound of an airy, ventilation machine like nature, which is recognized only when it changes the pitch.
"This world is leaving." Five-channel video installation. dimensions variable. 1995.
The video installation was made for and first shown in the exhibition: "No Man's Land." at the Nikolai Contemporary Art Centre, Copenhagen in 1995. an edition is part of the collection of the Moderna Museum in Ljubljana.
The video material of the "This world is leaving" is comprised of 36 mise-en-scenes, each edited in a time period of 60 seconds; each shows a group of people appearing out of black screen standing in a open spot in an urban surrounding. Soon they will move simultaneously in all the channels and leave the spot walking away and disappearing beyond the upper edge of the frame. The motion is slightly slowed down. Those are men and women, young and old, who bear a strong, recognizable visual features of Soviet identity, which being deprived of the living space by the historical developments is slowly vanishing. They start to move at a audio order, vaguely heard in the ambient sound which accompanies the installation, which constantly and rhythmically "breathes" - but only exhaling, and never inhaling. The "order", which they (and we too) hear in Russian is: "You may go", "go", "go now".
"We are friends" was realized for and first shown in the exhibition "Anteprima Bovisa - Milano. Europa 2000". at Palazzo della Triennale, in Milan, in 2001. It was a mixed media installation which consisted of the following parts: one video channel viewed through a monitor; pieces of torn balloons, which were stretched with stocking garters; two ilfochrome prints, 78cmx78cm, with future dates pronted in very small letters in the center of each. The video is a loop of 30 sequences of a similar mis-en-scene where I have a ballon next to my head which each time is blown.
This piece is a comedy about looking for a friend.
an ongoing object project
"T.L.I.te" is an ongoing sculptute/object project which started in 1991. Original piece starting the project was four cement casted forms, 5cmx8cmx74cm each, with a line of mirror appx. 2,5cmx68cm. It was first displayed in the exhibition "Heat and Conduct", in Gallery Arnolfini, in Bristol, in 19992; and in the exhibition "Kunstkammer" in Gallery "1.0" in Moscow, in 1993.
The idea was to create an object and manufacture an identity for it through a supposition usually used in museum collections of ancient archeological findings. E.g. one sees a plate-like form out of clay on a red velvet under the glass box cover in a museum exposition accompanied with a writing: "1500-1000 b.c. Ancient Egypt. Possibly a children toy"; or "possibly used in cosmetics." In the same way these cement casted forms with a mirror line were places in an expositional display tables with a glass cover, and were accompanied with a following writing: "XX century. USSR. Possibly used to look into the eyes.
I borrowed the idea for a possible purpose for the object from Roland Barth, who once wrote that we are the only ones who can not see ourselves. What we see in the mirror is only an image which we put on ourselves. So, this piece was offering to cut off all of the "image"-parts and leave only the eyes to look deep into them, and into yourself.
Later, at uneven intervals, on occasions I was producing "later replicas" of the "original piece" in different materials: marble, wood, etc.
I am a measure of your intelligence
"I am a measure of your intelligence" is one of those works, which consist of reflections, insights and word games, which need some medium of support , if they are to become visible or audible. In this case it is a sentence on a T-shirt. It aspires to becoming an enunciation that is not describing the state of things, but rather, one that produces a revelation. A revelation about how much we all are cause of each other and how much we effect or even determine the lives of each other. Instantly coinciding with the reality of our interrelatedness, the words on a shirt create an occasion of a face-off with the Other and manifest an opportunity for a meaningful communication.
This work had to be a performance to take place in the exhibition "The Desire for Freedom. Art in Europe since 1945." Kunsthistorische Museum, Berlin, in 2012.
Unfortunately due to disagreements between the House and me the piece was cancelled by the House.