Someday they will come to their senses.
When there are no more women left;
when the swamps come right up to the houses;
when underground springs start to flow in the middle of the streets
and a purple fog hangs over the roofs…
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Snail on the Slope
The current solo exhibition of Alexey Kallima in the VLADEY space can be considered a new stage in the development of his work over the past couple of years. A quick glance will immediately recognize the melancholic charm of his recent paintings from the "Edge" project, the same meditative canvases, sparse in color, the same fogs of the middle zone, monotonous landscapes of swamps and forest-steppes. Kallima's paintings are characterized by lightness, shimmer, doubling, sliding - and an abstract picture before our eyes suddenly acquires a distinct pattern of a sand ridge or mudflow facies, and then dissolves again in a superficial pattern devoid of direct analogies with reality.
Despite the fact that the works lack rigidity and predeterminedness, they can be compared to the works of Piet Mondrian - in that the composition can be speculatively continued in breadth to infinity, like a wet forest, the Ashe delta, a sandy beach. Of course, we are not talking about memories of vacations, not about tourism, idleness and adventures in the usual sense; there is no canvas built on counterpoints characteristic of the archetypal hiking quest. Here, leisurely solitary walks and stops somewhere very far from society and housing are closer in mood. Some works look like scans or casts of natural surfaces, like skins made of turf or bark - trophies of a distant forest. This kind of escapism has a touch of half a century of retro – when after the most severe trials, the natural version of existentialism, Ernst Jünger’s German-Scandinavian forest, came forward as Europe’s healer: nourishing soil, the basis of a virtuous life, which at the same time can provide shelter for partisans and bandits. Jünger’s forest is a radical form of inner freedom, a spiritual brotherhood of loners, in which the old romantic tradition is evident. The Soviet version of forest confrontation, presented by Leonid Leonov, is somewhat simpler and “darker”: the opposition to bureaucratic careerism (the main enemy in socialist realism) is natural “templarism”, in which devilry, paganism and deep chthonicity are read. It was in this vein that the brilliant Arkady and Boris Strugatsky interpreted Leonov's pompous "Russian Forest" in "Snail on the Slope" in 1965: as an uncontrollable and unsupervised force, internally mobilized for self-development. Moreover, the "Forestry Administration" existing nearby is completely unable to calculate the trajectory of this movement into the future, or even simply interact with the forest. The need for dialogue is what, perhaps, can be singled out as a significantly new feature in the artist's development of the theme of escapism into nature. In relation to the works of "Edge", something new is now appearing: the personalization of individual corners, let's call it that. These individuals are trees, a waterfall, the moon on a cloudy vault, and even the riverbed, which is also separated in appearance and meaning from the neighboring surfaces, it is a kind of carpet lined with water where it decided to flow. Singles and outlined fragments – this is how the second stage of the development of the landscape theme in Kallima appears.
A new frame of reference was anticipated by one incident. In fact, this is the only appearance of a man and his handiwork in the project: the image of a large suspension bridge and a gap in the boards, into which a small figure falls. In terms of the relationship between man and landscape, the composition is comparable to "The Fall of Icarus", attributed to Bruegel the Elder, but Alexei Kallima does not replace the noble labor of the ploughman in the famous painting. The dignity here belongs exclusively to the landscape – and the strength too. The subtle and graceful perspective of the bridge is opposed by a powerful stream of the river, and at the crossing there is an embarrassment (or a tragedy?). But it is precisely because of the opposition to man that the landscape now acquires individual features.
But it must be said that the figure of the postman in relation to the landscapes in Kallima is no less important for the philosophy of the project than Icarus' legs twitching in the water for the seascape. Here too we are talking about the belittling and overestimation of the dramatic hero and the cause he serves. Who would need letters today, even from a dead man, even to a colonel to whom no one writes, even if the postman rings twice? Solitude and silence – that is what the artist can offer to those who thirst for news, who depend on it, who are completely immersed in it. And also – a path in a dark forest, that is, another bridge, leading not outwards, but inwards – to the forest, to oneself. After all, in the end, the return to nature, seemingly abandoned in the distant sixties, carries more humanism and practical meaning at the moment when the bridge collapsed.
