Translated material
Roadside check
Exhibition of Igor Shelkovsky at the ERA Foundation
“The publisher is an artist” is not such an extravagant figure in Russian history. The Silver Age gave us a wonderful drawing art critic and journalist Alexander Nikolaevich Benois, whose works are best able to illustrate the materials of the leading publications of the turn of the century: “Old Years”, “World of Art”, “Capital and Estate”... His work sublimates the universal language and images era. It is very well-mannered, erudite, intelligent. It allows the era to move in the right direction, at the right time, and not get lost in the mud. An art critic who draws is an excellent inspector of the historical paths of the art world. He monitors the markings, installs traffic lights, prevents “accidents” by giving each phenomenon its own lane and fining arrogant upstarts and boors with oblivion.Igor Shelkovsky is a worthy successor to Benoit’s work, an exemplary art traffic cop. From 1979 to 1986, while in exile, he published the legendary magazine “A-Z”. Thanks to the magazine, we now have the opportunity to restore in detail the picture of unofficial Russian art. His own work - as a sculptor, painter, graphic artist, restorer - seems to be programmed to become an ideal illustration for his own magazine: to record all the most important and interesting things that happened in Russian modernism from its origins to Fyodor Semenov-Amursky, Shelkovsky’s teacher . The fact that the program is being successfully implemented is confirmed by the first ever complete monographic exhibition of Igor Shelkovsky, which opened at the new ERA Foundation for the Support of Visual Arts as part of the “Past Perfect” project. This project intends to introduce the work of unofficial artists of the 1960s-1980s.
Curator Alexander Panov, explaining the title of the exhibition “Dotted Line and Line,” draws attention to the fascinating combinatorics of images: the “monolithic construction” of the very foundations of plastic thinking and the “telegraphic” style of the actual formation, when the texture is striped “to the point of a skeleton, to a transparency that barely holds life.” This is a perfect metaphor for a road, a highway, a highway lined with white lines and signs, syncopated by telegraph poles and wires. (By the way, Irina Kulik also thought about road markings in relation to the “dotted” paintings of the 90s in her review of the exhibition.) Shelkovsky transformed his subjective aesthetic experience into a trajectory of movement through many chapters of Russian modernism. When you catch your eye on the various objects, paintings, or graphic sheets that comfortably inhabit the cozy hall of the ERA, you are involuntarily amazed at the variety of plastic formulas that Shelkovsky uses. Early painting is similar to Post-Impressionism; the objects seem to be inspired by Tatlin’s counter-reliefs; graphics - the analytical school of Pavel Filonov; recent works - geometric abstraction. Everything falls into place if we remember the main routes, the road, and the “dotted lines and lines” that stitch the art process together. Here we open the first issue of the magazine “A-Z”. After Boris Groys’s programmatic article “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism” comes a gallery of artists dear to the heart of both the publisher and the entire alternative art community. Comparing and comparing, one can guess that he “invited many to visit”, dedicating the best stations of his highway to them. Stencil abstractions, for example, resonate with the compositions of Oleg Lyagachev. Volumetric structural modules say hello to Oleg Sokhanevich and Boris Orlov. And the shortest way to the images of Shelkovsky’s graphics will help you find the following issues of the magazine, one of which contains a large essay about Pavel Filonov, and the other contains reproductions of paintings by Shelkovsky’s teacher Fyodor Semenov-Amursky.
The paradox is that all rhymes are not perceived negatively, as imitation or plagiarism. We are dealing with the phenomenon of the consciousness of the artist-publisher, for whom the ideas of fitting into a context, determining a place, being a traffic controller and inspector of the roads of history become the nerve of his own creativity. The humility of the personal ambitions of such people does not allow Hamlet’s very “connecting thread” to break. And it’s great that the ERA Foundation’s project to restore the complete picture of the Russian “second avant-garde” opened with an exhibition by Igor Shelkovsky.