SERGEI CHAIKA: SENTIMENTAL PAINTERLY

REPRESENTATION

 

 

The past decade has given us several artists who have made their mark in the field of painterly representation. Sergei Chaika is one of the most organic. But first something about the term. It emerged when notions of realism ceased to function outside a cultural-historical, chronological context and the notion of mimesis took on certain negative connotations, like the term naturalism in Soviet Marxist-Leninist aesthetics. There was a need to oppose something terminological to abstraction. Realism? To understand what kinds of realism were intended by this term meant turning on the mechanisms of commentary. Mimesis? Try and prove you’re not an old goat who trusts only the trampled pastures of natural likeness.

Conceptualism added to all this the problematic of speech acts, but nothing changed fundamentally. The opposition remained: abstraction versus painterly representation. In the seventies, eighties, and nineties, the problematic was, as it were, deferred: contemporary art actualized notions of mediality; object art and assemblage evolved according to their own laws; and many artists, of course, worked with painterly figuration, but in a functional, instrumentalized way. Thus, for example, the Sots Artists—let us take at least the early period of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid—easily traded in an abstractionist manner for I figurative approach (there is only one year between their History of Russia and their History of the USSR). The play with mythologcms dictated the choice of idiom. During this period, only a few artists consistently chose the problematic of painterly representation as something central and essential.

As exemplars of this approach I would single out three artists (of course, there were others) who, while they didn't avoid catching the postmodernist bug, were nevertheless little concerned with explications, references, and other kinds of expiatory and mediating maneuvers, The first artist is the American Eric Fischl: in his exclusively sensual art, sexual motivations clearly predominated over any others. The second  artist is another American, Alex Katz. In his portraits, the extreme reductionism resembles a process of sacralization; he really does fashion E icons for an urbanized world. The third artist is the Austrian. Gottfried I Helnwein. In his art. the choice of painterly representation, burdened by a moralist problematic, is a matter of Weltanschauung.

 At the very close of the nineties, Moscow saw the emergence of several young artists inclined to the type of vision that was, in quite conventional way, labeled realistic. For these artists, painterly representation had become not a game or an instrument, but a means of dwelling in art. Many of them were cast on the shores of Moscow on the crest of the Southern Russian wave which Marat Guelman generated with all his might.

Sergei Chaika hails from the south, from the lands that lie along the Kiev-Lvov-Krakow line. However, his work is a kind of "Machine- gun Cart from the South" (there was a film of this name): contact with headquarters has been lost, and the cart acts under its own orders. Therefore Chaika first ended up at Yakut Gallery — a place for refined aesthetes that generally doesn't welcome random kunstarbeiters.

Chaika immediately declared himself as an artist of the classicizing camp. For him, painterly representation denotes a serious, solemn attitude towards reality. The great Russian sculptor Alexander Matveev liked to say that it’s not worth bothering the sculpture with trifles. It appears that Chaika has also made it a rule not to trifle, not to ironize, not to hide behind references and allusions. (That is, not to wink at the viewer through a palimpsest of mediations: you know that I had in mind such-and-such, while in fact I had in mind just what I had in mind—and so on down through the entire concise postmodernist history of art.)

Good Lord, he doesn't even shy away from painting a still life of a branch. Or a landscape. He is not afraid of directly addressing literature, of a non-ironic, prc-Kharmsian appeal to Pushkin. At the same time, he is not apologetic: this is a rare quality among those who’ve chosen the path of painterly representation. One finds this tendency to apologize in, for example, the conveyor belt-like practice of Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov. Yes (they seem to say), we paint in a vigorous, lifelike manner, but as you can see yourself, this isn’t virtuosity, but hastiness that has been raised to the level of a cult. Of course we try to achieve visual impact, but the content, as you can see, is a joke. (True, in their work painterly execution sometimes acquires its own autonomy — it “goes where it wills." And when they take their time, trashiness is conceived as an element of poetics.)

Chaika makes no apologies. His version of painterly representation is natural and sentimental in the sense that it comes from his artistic nature, which, as it turns out, is tuned to a classicist key. His compositions are balanced and emblematic. His palette is a complex mix: finely adjusted in its treatment of chiaroscuro: dramatic in its preparation of the work's final chords; tempered in its use of textural touches. Perhaps (to borrow Alexander Benois's expression) he is an “artist of return”? 1 don't think so. Chaika’s evolution shows that stylizing or otherwise mimicking the old masters is extraneous to contemporary art. Because, despite his love for the coloristic mixes and compositional archetypes of the old masters, he gives us to understand that his vision is wholly contemporary.

His female portraits, which hearken to a Renaissance typology, have a fairly autonomous dimension that comes from the visual culture of the mass media, in his painting of two men carrying a third we clearly see Biblical iconography, but there is an immediate dramatic quality in it, akin to television news. His painting Boxing references George Bellows, but there is a hypercontemporary, mediatic intensity to the atmosphere. In certain pieces the artist himself gives the viewer a kind of clue. Often the background bears the traces of marking, of layout What is this? The preparation of a wall for a fresco, the way the old masters used to do it? Or is it an allusion to the decorative products of painting workshops, where the image was hurriedly driven through an epidiascope onto the canvas and sectioned into squares? Whatever the case, it is a sign that Chaika understands visuality as a medium. And that means that his stance towards the visual idiom is a matter of conscious choice.

Sergei Chaika has come to this exhibition at Triumph Gallery, with its specific approach to scale and quality of execution, fully armed with his chosen method. The depth and solidity of his rootedness in painterly representation enables him to consider any theme, even one seemingly discredited by official culture — for example, a war monument.

The seriousness of Chaika's manner of representation generates a phenomenological pause that allows him to “grab* a motif and instill it into the viewer’s conscious aside from its routine associations, in its non-banal aspect, in its immediate, painterly being.

Not every contemporary artist would take the conscious risk of entitling his exhibition “ Eternal Flame."

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Alexander Borovsky