Domestic art approached the large format, following the path of the Russian reversal or Russian invert: the artist tracked down and threw himself at the wolfhound of the century.
The big is seen from a distance
Modernity grew only in the underground, and only from the beginning of the thaw - but even then slowly, gradually, with the overcoming of the fear of repression, winning back only a small independent space from society. At that time, works were written at home, and materials for nonconformists were expensive, so they did not chase after size. There was another limitation of the format - the works were purchased, in addition to friends and rare progressive artists, mainly by foreigners, which is why the name deep art arose (which, naturally, has nothing in common with artificial intelligence). Art created for sending abroad using diplomatic - hence the name - mail simply could not afford to be large. The only great (deceptive) hopes were that there, abroad, someone from the professionals would see it and appreciate it. The work of Yegor Koshelev "Bath Day" from 2023 helps to remember the courage with which the heroes of the sixties overcame the academic canons of painting and national traditions on the way to the world artistic process.
In comparison with the heroic epic, the commitment to which is demonstrated by Koshelev's works, Leonid Tskhe, who also bases his painting method on the academic school, prefers ballet-pantomime, romantic choreography in the spirit of "Giselle" - majestic in that it equalizes the real and the imaginary in a single spectacle session.
Big Brother - a long voyage
However, the faster the thaw faded and the weaker the hopes for democratic change became, the bolder the artists approached the monster of ideology - the generation that would be called the socialist artists looked straight into the eyes of the beast and immediately began to mirror it, to demythologize it. Their works are not inferior in size to slogans and notice boards from the housing office, like the severed heads of the Gorgon Medusa, they are outwardly the same, only disarmed: the eyes are closed and the snakes no longer hiss. Pavel Pepperstein, an ironic exegete of Moscow conceptualism, shows us heads that seem to have been inherited from the classics - from the series "Hunters for Marble Heads. Archaeology of the Future." Here one can recall the hereditary curse only by looking at the sixth finger of a small girl's hand.
The stone desert eidoses on Maria Serebryakova's canvas "Visibility or Event Horizon" are also formed by ideas of the past and resemble dried-up riverbeds of mighty currents, reservoirs of oceans that have sunk into oblivion - now you can't drown in them, although it is tempting to imagine it.
A large canvas pleases the eye
Speaking of Moscow conceptualism, especially during the time of its triumphant reign after perestroika, it is involuntarily credited with all the parallel creative achievements - for example, the discovery of installation. While in fact, the installation approach was nurtured in the early 1980s in the new wave environment, the young generation of artists actively collaborating within the framework of apt art, apartment exhibition projects on Dmitry Ulyanov Street (well, and then in many other places). In addition to objects and installations, new wave loved comics and worked in this manner, creating unusually long works in fast, light and expressive graphics. This also inspires, although not with the same degree of optimism, today's adherents of youth culture - Inal Savchenkov, Alexey Kallima and Mikhail Dolyanovsky.
Today's drive (a jazz word meaning growing energy and movement) is a state that is a little dubious, wounded, like Savchenkov's work "Counter-Jazz" or aggressive, like Dolyanovsky's quadriptych "Untitled".
As for Kallima and his "Wool", here the author simply encrypts, obviously not wanting to reveal to the viewer the source of the beautiful centric waves on the grass.
Big Change
Alexey Kallima's work is very close to abstract painting, although it is not. It is related to modern non-figurative canvases by its scale, coloristic modesty and commitment to an elongated, peephole-like format. Indeed, looking at the works of Vlad Kulkov and Kolya Sadovnik, it seems that the sources of their inspiration are in completely new impulses, unknown to the viewer brought up on the traditions of the last century: abstract expressionism, monochrome, geometric abstraction. Compared to action painting, today's authors have a different rhythm: the hum of sociality, the beating of technical pulses. These works are collected and ordered, like polarized radiation among the chaotic signals of space. And - another piece of news, abstraction is now considered a permitted art, it has been cleared of suspicions of formalism and dissidence.
