THE TRADITION OF LIGHT, OR THE LIGHT OF TRADITION:
THE ART OF SERGEI CHAIKA
The artist’s task is to restore connections, to clear the horizons of the disorderly heap of paltry facts that, like, wind-fallen trees, obstructs all historical perspectives.
Alexander Blok
The history of twentieth-century artistic culture states that by midcentury the fine arts had begun to experience an undeniable internal crisis conditioned by the cumulative exhaustion brought on by the constant, decades-long movement towards certain boundaries. For many long years the criterion for determining whether these boundaries had been reached was the innovativeness of the artistic utterance—put more simply, newness of form plus a corresponding content. The latest wave (certainly not the first of its kind in the twentieth century) of a retrospective return to the past began. This time, however, it was not limited to a temporary rejection of abstract, semi-figurative or grotesquely exaggerated forms for the sake of drawing renewed inspiration and new creative impulses from the inexhaustible reserves of classicism and neoclassicism, which had surefire prescriptions for harmonizing form and content. Artists turned their gaze to the aesthetic systems of distant ages and the not-so-distant past: they not only tried to find in these systems qualities and aspects relevant to their own practice, but also to synthesize them in order to conjure up a qualitatively different artistic product. It turned out that the turn to the past underwrote the emergence of new artistic ideas and the creation of the most cutting-edge works of the present day. This entire phase of art and culture is sometimes called the “postmodern condition."
Nowadays it is clear that this fairly lengthy period of the "revaluation of values” is over. And although, as compared with previous such stages, no fundamentally new artistic phenomena and movements emerged, the postmodernist phase yielded a good number of discrete, convincing artistic achievements. Oriented towards a respectful and sincerely engaged understanding of the pre-modern era’s artistic legacy, this discourse made possible the emergence of a whole generation of outstanding individuals who have come to the fore only in recent times.
Sergei Chaika emerged on the Moscow art scene two years ago. He is still a fairly young artist — his thirtieth birthday is just around the corner. Chaika came to the Russian capital from neighboring Ukraine; he received his artistic education in the western Ukrainian city of Uzhgorod and in Krakow. Chaika’s first works, exhibited at Art Moscow and at Yakut Gallery. already showed that he was a completely self-sufficient master, an artist in possession of a fulls formed and perfectly determinate system of artistic views and principles.
Executed in the traditional medium of oil on canvas, Chaika's works are quite untraditional in terms of their style. The artist conceives each work not only as a freestanding easel painting, but also as part of a much larger cycle or multipart composition. The semantic connection between the parts of this project is not always obvious. This connection is, rather, associative and speculative, and. in certain cases, irrational.
The first project that Sergei Chaika presented to Moscow viewers was entitled “Pushkin.” Alongside an immediately recognizable image of the great poet (as the prototype for his portrait of Pushkin. Chaika used the nineteenth-century sculptures of Opekushin and Halberg. which became canonical in the Soviet-Russian cultural tradition), the cycle also included images that, superficially, were unconnected with Pushkin: the ruins and facade of a burnt bouse: an explosion; three dose-ups of young women (one. semi-nude; another is hiding her face with her hands). While the architectural fragments and general views are seen, as it were, through a wide-angle lens, the human faces and figures (including the sculptural Pushkin) are represented as if a closed-circuit camera has photographed them. They are viewed from an unusual perspective — either slightly too high or slightly too low — and in such a way that the proportions and the entire pictorial space are seemingly distorted by the movement of a hypothetical zoom lens. Employing the most varied images as his prototypes — from documentary' and personal photographs to the works of other artists. Chaika manipulates them like readymade visual formulas that have been transfigured by contemporary means of optical transformation and interpretation. “Pushkin” (who is, as the saying goes, “our everything") genuinely becomes a mirror for a multitude of themes and motifs from the life of the present day, where there is a place for beauty and love, for tears, loneliness, and tragic deaths.
Intriguing connections also bind the elements of Sergei Chaika’s new project, “Eternal Flame.” The new cycle likewise includes medium- (80x 100) and large-format (160*200) monochromatic canvases. These compositions represent a brief anthology of motifs from the international visual art of the modem and contemporary ages. The viewer will find still lifes, landscapes, genre paintings, nudes, and Christian iconography. I think that the latter is
the key to understanding Chaika’s new works.
A seated nude young woman, eyes chastely downcast. A second young woman in a white kerchief, her eyes lowered as she bends over something that remains outside the pictorial frame. A third young woman, lost in thought (we see only her face). And finally, a fourth young woman, dressed in black, her arms pressed to her chest: she experiences genuine clarity—her gaze is directed heavenwards and she seems to be flying somewhere. Are these the heroines of the Gospel story of Christ’s sojourn on earth? Is this the artist’s vision of the image of the Virgin Mary, who first receives the Good News, then recognizes her son’s supreme calling and the necessity of the future sacrifice, then mourns her son after He departs this earthly vale of suffering, and finally herself is assumed into Heaven? This hypothesis is borne out by the special glow that encircles the heads and figures of the four women depicted on the canvases of this cycle. Chaika has often spoken of his admiration for the old masters. Is it in this particular light that we can see Chaika’s genuine continuity with them — with the leading figures of the late Renaissance, Baroque, and Romantic periods?
The other paintings in this new cycle — for example, the boxing match and the bearing of a wounded man’s body — also give us cause to favor such an interpretation. While we might interpret the first painting (which seems to fall out of the context of archetypal Christian motifs) as an allegory of the struggle between good and evil, the second painting appears quite congenial to the overall metaphorical spirit of the entire cycle, the more so because, in terms of its composition, “Bearing the Body of the Wounded Man” almost completely reprises one of the most famous depictions of the “deposition from the Cross" — Caravaggio's Entombment of Christ.
In keeping with this logic, the deserted and melancholic landscape with a river running through it is, as it were, a symbol of the sadness, mixed with expectation, that flooded the whole world after the dead Christ was deposed from the Cross and entombed. The still life of three carnations in a simple vase is an allusion to the three days that passed after this entombment. The obelisk illuminated by moonlight is an image of Christ’s temporary grave, from which he emerged resurrected, to the joy of his disciples and followers.
The mindset of contemporary humanity — at the very least in Russia — can be described as a tangle of contradictory and sometimes opposed notions: optimism or near-idealistic romanticism versus extreme cynicism; profound religiosity versus various kinds of superstitions and pagan rituals; finally, an almost unlimited faith in technological progress versus all manner of apocalyptic expectations. To a certain degree, such apocalyptic moods are inspired by the informational field in which we dwell: not a day goes by without news of disasters, accidents, etc. Therefore the image of a burning building flooded in bright light — another painting in Chaika’s new project — is a key to under-standing the series. The painting is a visual embodiment of the cycle’s title, “Eternal Flame.” Moreover, this image— directly copied as it were from a TV news broadcast or a movie screen—is simultaneously a symbol of fiery renewal, a sign of the apocalyptic flame that comes from the understanding that we are confronted with the clear, that envelopes the universe in the Book of Revelation. Thanks to this painting, the project takes on a logic and a wholeness. I should stress that Sergei Chaika enters here into direct dialogue with his great and distant predecessors, and yet at the same time he relies on the discoveries of more recent art. The experience of the old masters is more important to him in an iconographical and compositional sense, while the heroes of modernism have enriched Chaika with their appeal to the principles of metaphor, to the depiction of hyperreality, as well as with devices borrowed from other visual arts, from photography and video.
Despite the dramatic spirit that permeates “Eternal Flame,” we viewers cannot help but experience the kind of inward clarity that always accompanies the contemplation of a serious, nuanced work of art and the satisfaction that comes from the understanding that we are confronted with the clear, vivid statement of an original, extraordinarily gifted contemporary artist.
Andrey Tolstoy
Doctor of Art History