Valentin Dyakonov. A celebration of subjectivity

It’s very funny to read in curatorial statements and art magazines that painting is returning to the world art scene, that painting is relevant. It’s funny because it didn’t go anywhere: it was the painting exhibitions that attracted the largest number of spectators. It’s just that the artists scattered in all directions across the fields of installations and performances. And they completely lost all will to make personal statements. In the 90s, the creators were gallerists and curators. Just as the owner of a television channel influences the program schedule, the owners of art circulation channels - biennales, galleries, museums - formed the range of topics with which artists were invited to speak. The often emphasized commercial aspect is not even that important here. The important thing is that in the 80s and 90s the phenomenon of liberal academicism arose . A certain topic is set - gender, leftist movement, sociality, tested for relevance by authoritative thinkers. The artist in his work must “reflect” the supposed “reality”: consumer attitudes towards women, ethnic conflicts, marginalized people on the margins of society. These “Big Topics” could come from curators, or they could be transmitted through other channels - magazines, for example. The new version of academicism differed from the system of relationships that had developed among the artists and apparatchiks of socialist realism in the absence of repressions against dissidents (at least severe repressions) and stylistic heterogeneity, bordering, however, on the diversity of colors of Laktionov and Plastov.

It so happened that now the painting has become a type of work in which maximum freedom from the pointing finger of the curator is possible. The pattern is simple: to build an installation, the artist has to depend on workers and the gallery owner who provides the space. Yes, and a curator, of course, who will give the work the honorable status of an installation, that is, a sculpture whose architectonics rests on the curator’s word of honor. Video art, like its father cinema, is an engaged art. Painting is much more intimate and inexpensive to produce.

It was impossible to remain “one on one” with the works that were part of the “Big Theme”. It's like at a disco: it's not so much the music that makes us dance, but also the pulsating light, and the artificial smoke screen, and the people around. The smokescreen for curatorial projects was theories and ideas, mostly humanistic and progressive. But the music, that is, the work itself, without smoke, often did not sound, as happens at discos. Artists have become terribly lazy: why look for a way to reach the viewer, when from the very beginning your work ends up, as it were, in a museum, where it is classified, compared with its predecessors, cataloged?

It is unlikely that the situation has changed much after the painting was rehabilitated. Perhaps curators and museum workers are simply tired of banging their heads against the wall of spectator indifference. One way or another, the artist-painter, not the one who paints on canvas, but the one who is maximally responsible for his work and for the fact that it will be seen and perceived by the viewer, again found himself in the exhibition halls. There are still artists who can do without curatorial crutches. It's gratifying. And there are very recent examples of this, which will be discussed.

The Gelman Gallery, for example, shows the St. Petersburg artist Vitaly Pushnitsky , who has been doing interesting things for a good seven years. And it is being exhibited for the first time at the Institute for the Actualization of Art, which is the Gelman Gallery. The press release draws an analogy with the promoters of fine arts from the New Academy of Timur Novikov. The analogy is inappropriate - the “new academicians” are neither bad nor good painters, but they put on the masks of conservatives and wink at the viewer. The New Academy is a curatorial project. Pushnitsky's painting is about something completely different.

Pushnitsky adds fluorescent lamps to his black-and-white canvases as a structural element. The exhibition takes place without additional lighting. This, by the way, emphasizes, among other things, the complete independence of the artist from the one who exhibits his paintings. The lamps are hung at a certain angle to the paintings. Sometimes the lamp becomes a structural element of the painting. In the image of a dead man lying on the street, a lamp pierces his side. In other works, lamps represent a source of light. In the paintings, the light falling from the lamps is painted. That is, the lamp simultaneously illuminates the picture and is a source of light for the image. This original formal technique was not found simply for the sake of the third dimension. With the exception of the above example, the characters in Pushnitsky's works are children. The most successful paintings combine the naturalness of the plot and the warm retrospectivity of black and white. In one of the paintings, a girl with childish maximalism puts a loaf of bread in her mouth - a very life-like scene. The convention of a fluorescent lamp, perhaps some cumbersomeness of the solution, works to create a minimum distance between the image and the viewer. Scenes from family life seem to be illuminated by the viewer.

Another artist who is able to create a conceptual frame for himself and is therefore independent is Viktor Pivovarov. Several events are associated with his name in Moscow. Two exhibitions - "Steps of a Mechanic" in the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val and "In a Dark Room" in the XL Gallery . And a new book, already the third in a row, - “On the love of words and images” ( UFO ). About a hundred works were brought by the artist from Prague, where he moved in 1981.

Viktor Pivovarov is one of the masters of conceptualism, who, together with Ilya Kabakov, developed the “album” genre. In Russia he is best known for his illustrations for children's books. Among other underground artists who made money from book graphics, Pivovarov stands out with a very attractive and recognizable manner. Anyone who has held in their hands the book by Genrikh Sapgir “The Red Ball”, “My Imagination” by Zakhoder or Andersen’s fairy tales designed by Pivovarov will understand me. For others, we can recommend Irina Pivovarova’s book, published by NLO Publishing House. Pivovarov was seriously involved in design work, since for a long time he believed that his creativity was completely exhausted by illustration. But in the early 70s, Pivovarov turned to painting.

For most conceptualists, a picture, in accordance with the constructions of the theorists of abstract painting, is a plane. The space depicted on it is artificial. This is a dummy that can only be enlivened by extraneous elements - texts, bars, breaks. This space has no depth, which is why in Eric Bulatov’s painting the village landscape is framed with the inscriptions “Danger”. In relation to the landscape, the inscription plays the role of a warning: this is not a real lawn, it is dangerous to take it at face value. The space of Pivovarov’s paintings is theatrical. It is a stage that has its own perspective, a stage on which a variety of characters act. In the autobiographical book “Agent in Love” (UFO, 2001), Pivovarov talks, in particular, about the heroes of his works - objects: a shoe, a cup of tea, a loaf of bread.

Conceptual artists worked with different types of sources. Posters, advertisements, lists, ledgers... They enjoyed using the texture of everyday life. Brewers are no exception. His wonderful series of works dedicated to communal childhood are reminiscent of fire safety manuals in style. But the marginal, rough style of the first aid instructions comes alive with personal, memoiristic content. Even the texts on a faded lilac background are not so much a chorus of intrusive and disorienting voices of a communal apartment, like Kabakov’s, but rather random phrases heard by a child, remembered for unknown reasons and emerging in memory as part of a unique personal experience.

It’s not just the lapidary Soviet poster that enlivens the brewers. In his paintings from the “Eidos” series, Malevich’s Suprematist peasants acquire additional depth and volume. At the exhibition “In Malevich’s Circle” that took place three years ago, a panorama of the students of the great Casimir was presented, who perceived the master’s developments as academic models. The place of educational antiquity was taken by Suprematist constructions. Pivovarov takes this attitude to its logical conclusion: his paintings in the style of Malevich depict animals, and the Suprematist man appears in the surroundings of a classical painting by Van Eyck and Pietro della Francesca. Even Malevich himself, who tried to make his voice sound as if from nowhere, from the heavenly world of pure essences, turns into a character in Pivovarov. In Pivovarov's exact reproduction of Malevich's late self-portrait, the avant-garde artist's left eye is covered by a fox - a symbol of seduction, a werewolf from Japanese myths. That is, nothing human is alien to Suprematist man and his creator.

It is characteristic that both Pushnitsky and Pivovarov turn to the world of childhood. In different ways, of course: Pushnitsky is an observer, Pivovarov is partly a memoirist, partly playing, like a child, at various heroes. The world of childhood is the world of the triumph of subjectivity. At the opening of the exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery, Viktor Pivovarov said a wonderful thing: “The exhibition is designed for a thoughtful viewer, but a superficial viewer is enough for me.” Indeed, the viewer can be captivated by Pivovarov’s manner, approach, and, say, interesting play with tradition. In addition, the pleasure of the exhibition is completely childish. The pictures attract me and fascinate me. They force me to be a maximalist: I assure you, these exhibitions are a must-see. Bleeding from the nose.