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In your interviews and speeches you say that literature is very important to you and that while reading texts you often come up with ideas for new works. Could you tell us, please, what books and authors or trends in literature are particularly interesting to you and why?
Russian people are connected to the text, I still think in poststructuralist concepts, and I am no exception. We accumulate texts, we read books, things, spaces, and we are not in a hurry to replace reading with looking. If art is a way of telling a story, where the picture becomes a derivative of the text, the image returns to its original essence: illustration.
Reading works like a navigator – pictures appear like a camera flash, the task is to have time to manifest the image on the canvas. Often the frame includes related subjects from the classics, canonical texts or texts without an author. Borges proposed to reduce everything written to four plots: war, – 1. the siege of a city and 2. the return home – example, the Iliad and the Odyssey, 3. the quest – Jason and the Argonauts, and 4. the suicide of a god – the New Testament. This is the canvas on which literature is embroidered and the more stories that connect, the more complex the layers on the canvas read.
The first plot with cows is found in Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, a textbook novel – the cow, like a messiah, appears to the people as a miracle. There are many such coincidences, the cow is often used as a living symbol connecting the subjects of Christian iconography, confessions and pre-religious mythology.
I would like to ask you separately about the symbols that your work is full of. Different eras and different cultures have developed their own systems of symbols, which sometimes overlap and coincide or, on the contrary, are quite different. How do you work with your symbolic language? Do you draw on a particular tradition, mix different systems, or create something new? Which sources are particularly important to you?
To answer this question, we would like to extend the idea of a symbol to a rhetorical figure, – for example, a metaphor in a text combines derivatives of metonymy or synonymy and can be transposed into another discipline by means of language. Thus, for example, in Hermann Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game,” – having reached the pinnacle of skill, a musician will play a mathematical formula and vice versa, a mathematician will decipher the harmony. With the help of images on canvas, I would like to learn how to create complex statements that can be read by a person of any religion and worldview.
The works of Russian masters became the basis for the creation of such patterns – this belonging to the culture, the foundation for subsequent layers of meaning. For example, plots with fragments of church interiors covered in paintings with cows among the saints. This series came about when I came across Ilya Glazunov’s work At the Collective Farm Warehouse. Glazunov depicts the interior of a church where a painted Nativity scene is juxtaposed with a suspended cow carcass. Temples in the 1930s were being turned into slaughterhouses – a vivid social metaphor for the abandonment of God. I see it as an homage to Rembrandt’s “The Slaughtered Ox”, transferred to Soviet reality. In my work, the cow returns from under the butcher’s axe back to the baby’s cradle, witnessing the transformation of human faith.
Aesthetically, your works are reminiscent of Baroque art; they too have a theatrical effect, a stage, draperies and a moment of surprise. At the same time, they echo the tradition of pastoral landscapes seen in many English manor houses. What does this tradition of the Old Masters of the 17th and 18th centuries mean to you? Why do you work with it?
The Baroque era is the central episode that defined the qualitative complication of human thought. Baroque art is recognizable by detail, drama and complex subjects in draperies. Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of the Baroque in the concept of the fold (The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque) develops the idea of the Leibnizian monad, presenting the fold as a model of the complex relationship between objects. The genius of a philosopher according to my observation is to be next to actual scientific discoveries. Draping is like a model of a gravitational field: if you place different-sized objects on a stretched fabric, the structure will change, but it will remain interconnected. This is how Baroque works – each fold affects the plot, creating the effect of a dramatic, performative action of the meeting of times, where my works enter into a dialogue with Russian masters, and elements of English pastoral landscape – with Shakespearean theater. And the 17th and 18th centuries – the Baroque, after all!
Your works, like Baroque art, look monumental: when I look at them, I imagine them inside architecture or a large installation. I wonder if there is a particular place you would like to show them in. How much do you think the space surrounding artworks affects the way we perceive them?
I try to keep the recursion: the object of space within the painting is self-sufficient, but tolerant of what is going on around it. The palette is limited to a few colors according to the tradition of canonical painting – Prussian blue, yellow and red ochre, black and whitewash – the works are put into context thanks to natural hues. I often borrow combinations from natural stone and use onyx as a basis for experimentation. You have rightly noted that the compositions are monumental. In time I would like to work with alargerformat, complicating the interval between the scale of the object inside and outside the boundary of the canvas. This is choreography for which space is important because the body is involved in the process. Frescoes and murals as murals are created directly in the place where they will remain, becoming a product of the interaction between the artist and the space, and the space with the painting, as in Baroque architecture.
In your opinion, to what extent do the artistic techniques and images from the art of the old masters allow us to talk about the problems that surround us in our reality? And does art even have the task of responding to the current agenda?
This is where thoughts of the value of human life come to mind – everything is measured by it. It’s as if the task is not so much to create as to watch and remember. Art should be kind – this is the main thing I would like to learn from telling stories that have made the world a better place. The Legacy of Russian Art is one of those. It resonates because I am a character of my time, and my love for the old masters is a memory I keep.
My dialog with authors of the past is inevitable, because I work with stories that have lived and loved, that I want to pass on to children. The example of the cow carcass is important because the question of faith and its role for man seems to be relevant again – my work has a very personal message to those who, like me, feel that they belong to a culture that is going through a difficult time.
