The exhibition "I Can Draw a Fisherman" features works created over a span of 50 years, from 1974 to 2024. The earliest drawing, "Telegram," was made when the artist was just eight years old.
In 2019, during my large exhibition at the Garage Museum, the curator of the exhibition, Ekaterina Inozemtseva, gave an interview about me, in which she made a remark that, for some reason, filled me with delight. She said: “...it seems that the artist Pepperstein has not changed since the age of 7. His system and method were formed then, in childhood, and have hardly changed since...”
Whether this is true or not is up to the audience of this exhibition to judge, where my drawings created between 1974 and 2024 are presented. The oldest drawing here ("Telegram") was made when I was eight years old.
But why was I so pleased to read Ekaterina Inozemtseva's remark? And do I agree with it myself? Perhaps I have always sought constancy (is that so? I don’t know; maybe). Or have I always tried to prove that constancy can be extraordinarily diverse and entertaining? That constancy does not have to become boring?
In this case, the figure representing constancy takes the form of a fisherman. No matter what happens around him, this fisherman sits with his rod, so phlegmatic and immersed in a trance that he appears almost as an inanimate object.
However, I have never been a fisherman. Rather, I was an anti-fisherman. More precisely, I was an anti-fisherman during a certain period of my childhood. During that time, I often hovered around fishermen engrossed in their activities (for example, on Lake Senezh in the Moscow region during winter). But I was not drawn to these self-forgetting figures because I was interested in fishing. I was captivated by an activity that was both mischievous and merciful—I was saving caught fish. When I was sure that the fisherman was looking the other way, I would sneak up and toss the caught fish back into the water. For this activity, I was nearly beaten several times. But my youth and the phlegmatic nature of the fishermen saved me.
And yet, I can draw a fisherman…
Returning to the theme of constancy—clearly, in the earthly world, constancy is impossible. Therefore, striving for constancy is a pursuit of the impossible. So, no matter how much I resemble the person I was many years ago, this youthful version of my being is different enough for me to perceive this youthful self as a co-author. I am generally inclined towards co-authorship. At this point in my life, I have two co-authors—Sonya Stereostyrski (my companion in the P.P.S.S. group) and myself, living somewhat in the first half of the 1980s. Thus, I not only display my youthful drawings but sometimes color them, add to them, and even turn them into large paintings. I was inspired to do this by two works by Ilya Kabakov: "The Little Waterman" and "Ran Away from the Kitchen Glue." Both of Kabakov's works are enlarged illustrations for Soviet children's books, transformed into large conceptual paintings hanging in a modern art museum. Kabakov demonstrates that the same image can acquire a fundamentally different status depending on the context of the statement and the modification of its size and materials. A Soviet illustration from a book turns into a conceptual painting in a contemporary art museum. One could say that the conceptual Kabakov uses the illustrator Kabakov as a "donor." I, by creating paintings based on my youthful drawings, use my own youth as a "donor."
P.P.
2025
