Translated material
Mandolin, guitar and bass
Suprematist music of all kinds in the gallery of Gary Tatintsyan
The fact that Suprematism is not a dispassionate art, but one with character and mood, is brilliantly demonstrated by the exhibition “Suprematist Canon”, which opened at the Gary Tatintsian Gallery. There are three reasons to visit this exhibition. Firstly, unique graphic sheets and objects of four pillars of the avant-garde are presented: Kazimir Malevich, Nikolai Suetin, Ilya Chashnik, Vasily Ermilov. Very, very few people have seen these sheets and sculptures. They are from a private collection. The second reason is that their authenticity is guaranteed (and this, given the sea of avant-garde fakes in which the antique market was once drowned, is a unique fact). All works come from the collection of the “second avant-garde” artist Lev Nusberg, who left Russia in 1976. For him, collecting the works of Russian avant-garde artists was in no way a commercial act, but a purely aesthetic one: he was compiling an archive of those who influenced his own method and style. He knew the descendants of Malevich’s students and received everything first-hand. So “checked - no mines.” Finally, the third reason is the short duration of the exhibition - only until August 5th. And then, according to gallery owner Gary Tatintsyan, who brought part of the Nusberg collection to Russia, there will be vacations.Observing, comparing and contrasting graphic sketches of Suprematist compositions by different gurus, you tune in to different spatial-plastic “tonals”. Nervous and fast, prone to abstruse experiments, Chashnik (a genius who did not live to be thirty) cuts color high and thin with geometry. Its architectons are fragile and sonorous. The fact that Suprematism can be as popular and decorative as guitar romances was understood best by Nikolai Suetin. He perfectly mastered the ornamental, planar design of geometric modules - an indispensable component of today's household design. Heavy and dense - similar to the shape and sound of a double bass - the objects were made by the Ukrainian avant-garde artist Vasily Ermilov. He imprinted the Suprematist canon into eternity with three-dimensional stereometric monuments (there are two models on display, dedicated to different epoch-making revolutions).
This trio of mandolin, guitar and bass is led, of course, by Malevich himself. His light, pencil sketches are otherwise a tuning fork for spatial thinking as such. The “instrumentation” of the three artists, by analogy with the ingenuous song of the 40s about “mandolin, guitar and bass” performed by Eddie Rosner’s jazz orchestra, is even symbolic. After all, according to the lyrics of the song, the trio tried very hard to please the pretty girl. And the guys wondered which of them she was in love with. In vain they wondered: “And she loved with all her soul // The Red Navy man to her neighbor Danil.” Like that flighty proletarian public who, in the end, preferred the simple heroic painting of socialist realism to all the artistic explorations of the Suprematists.