Permeating Ivory Black
The defiant rejection of the color "language" that Leonid Tskhe used before needs an explanation; otherwise we will not be able to understand his outstanding expressionist gesture. After all, all the paintings presented at this exhibition are painted with a single black pigment, burnt bone (Ivory Black), without the addition of any other dyes.
It is known that if you want to understand what the artist is talking about, it is necessary to clarify his origin: what landscapes accompanied his childhood and youth, what was the light that illuminated his early time, how he distinguished the horizon, how long was his shadow, which he stepped on at different times of the day. The answers to these questions will make it clear a lot about his artistic world.
Leonid Tskhe is a real St. Petersburg artist, both by origin (he was born near Peterhof) and by education (Tshe received it at the Academy of Arts). The nature of illumination in the north-west of Russia, where white nights spill over in summer, and in winter the daytime interval is almost imperceptible, dictates a special understanding of color. Because of the low sun, which invariably gives long shadows, it can be called sliding. Few of the artists of Leningrad/St. Petersburg felt the power of daylight, giving not literary allusions or constructive strategies, but the pure excitement of the foundation of visible life. But it is precisely this quality of experience that painting always strives for. Therefore, St. Petersburg art is highly literary-centric: it narrates rather than paints. And, as I wrote above, there are compelling reasons for this.
If you walk around the old St. Petersburg houses, where the remains of the original interiors are still preserved, then such a thing is surprising: the highest quality of grisailles that served as an addition to them, for example, in the form of imitations of neo—antique bas-reliefs, classicist sculpture, architectural forms like columns, vases, bowls and urns, painted almost entirely in gray, less often in sepia. They always imitate some kind of absolute landscape, against which mythological scenes are played out. The mastery of these works, which have lost most of their authorship, is capable of striking. They cannot be correlated with the heavy landscape painting of the same era: they are airy, light, romantic and at the same time expressively accurate. It was as if the thrill of impressions, often fictitious, and the impeccable distinctness of lexical means, which remain unchanged, converged in them. Therefore, they appear to be art — and it is in this context that one should understand the monochrome works of Leonid Tskhe, who is discovering a new authenticity.
Firstly, this artist's virtuoso drawing, his sense of line, boundaries and the weight of the tonal spot are psychologically oversaturated. The paintings of this artist cause a "nervous response", which is why it is impossible not to look at them: they seem to suck in, like a funnel of someone else's life suddenly opened up, emitting a powerful light of recognition on the witness / contemplator. This is a special vision – it cannot be learned, it is, in essence, primitive, very powerful and reliable. With this way of seeing, with all its expressiveness and fluency, sometimes even randomness, it is impossible not to agree. It is as if you are dealing with an accuracy achieved without an analytical procedure, unforeseen and incredible. But its brand is so high that it claims to be symbolic in nature.
Of course, such a limitation of funds raises a question: the artist does not even use whitewash, and the only way to achieve transparency of tone is liquid polishing on the white ground of the canvas. This is where the phenomenon of "dark color" arises: these paintings do not appear in black and white (which they actually are), but seem to emanate accumulations of unlived color given in reserve. It is as if Leonid Tskhe was speaking in the language of meanings that are colored for us, in the arsenal of our experiences.
I keep thinking about how close it is to poetry, but not in the sense of the plots set out in the poetic texts, but quite differently, because the poetic text is printed on white paper with graphic letters, but if this is a genuine poem, then the whole visible multicolored world with its deep content, events and incidents literally falls on us, mental states of longing or grace. Indeed, culture sometimes appears as unity in the most unexpected variations.
Looking at these exciting canvases, extremely large and open, like a human feeling, and intimate and hidden, like the content of this feeling, you understand what kind of self-waste is revealed before our eyes. The artist sees what we want to see: it's as if he's talking about what we know, but for some reason we're not talking. (Without naming the obvious in words, we lose access to the visible). It's as if this is a dream that we once saw, which explained a lot, but was lost when we woke up. Our nature is such that we are doomed to remember this loss. Probably, such a memory is motivated by a stingy choice of means of visual expressiveness. For the unconscious, the most stable thing in us, is devoid of details, and yet nothing can compare with it in the degree of accuracy: there is nothing more capacious and dramatically meaningful. So it is here. A stingy language speaks with the richest meanings, which become color-bearing in ourselves, who have discerned their innermost, read and remembered their trembling vibrations.
That's how poetry lives. Here is Batyushkov writing in 1819 "the great grisaille" about the ancient Roman Baiae, submerged in the Bay of Naples, in black letters on white paper — but how much there is a delightful and ghostly similarity with what we see today in the painting of Leonid Tskhe:
"You wake up, O Baia, from the tomb
When Aurora rays appear,
But the crimson denny won 't give it to you
The radiance of the past days,
Will not return cool shelters,
Where swarms of beauties basked,
And never your porphyry colonnades
Blue waters will not rise from the bottom."
Konstantin Batyushkov
Nikolay Kononov
