Vlad Kulkov's painting is a collision with a waterfall of color and natural indomitability. What pulsates underground - roots, piercing, strong, unstoppable. What pulsates on the surface - bends of stems, waves of algae, tree bark, moss on rocks. Life in all its tenacity of movement reveals itself in Vlad Kulkov's paintings: these are not static structures, they are vortices, streams. Whirlwinds of grass, winds, currents, electromagnetic waves. Kulkov looks into the "depths of things". Even what was once frozen was mobile and contains this energy inside. And stones continue to shimmer when light refracts in them. The artist adds silver powder to the paints to reflect how, when the rays fall, the seemingly complete form changes. Vlad Kulkov's painting is a captured stream, the dying and rebirth of a world in which, in fact, nothing ever freezes. Vlad Kulkov's practice does not contain rituals, but in its essence it is similar to a shamanic ritual, in which the artist finds a deep connection with the surrounding world. The artist leaves the city when he paints a series of works. He observes the language of nature either in the Karelian northern forest, or traveling through the tropics and deserts of South America, or unrolling canvases right on the seashore. For the last few years, Kulkov has been living in the mountains of Georgia. Straight figures of rock formations have appeared in his paintings from the surrounding landscape: "The layering of the local mountains is fascinating. Layers, then shifts, breaks. I also perform this extraction - the removal or placement of a fragment."
The artist sees a repeating pattern in nature as a language that one can, if not learn to read, then learn to write - to manifest. Kulkov compares his method of work with the "camera obscura", known since ancient times, through a small opening of which in a closed dark space one can obtain an optical projection, for example, of a real landscape located behind a wall or the starry sky above the roof. For Kulkov, painting itself is not of primary importance. It is important for him to implement this form of mediation of the "camera obscura". For Kulkov, canvases are a surface on which the projection of the "large unity" is woven with the movements of a brush, where there is simultaneously a reflection of a mollusk in the shell, a forest in a drop of dew, reflections of lava in the mouth of a volcano and the strokes of proto-writing. As Kulkov himself says: "I am chasing the impossible, trying to catch dreams." In this "reflected" universe, man is present, but as a small part of the elements: in some of Kulkov's paintings one can discern emerging faces, figurative outlines, even the windows of his studio. The artist sees everything as part of multiple interconnections, referring to Deleuze's concept of the rhizome in his understanding: as a mycelium that has no beginning and no end, where the multitude is unity. So Vlad Kulkov's painting always leaves a feeling that it is only a part of something bigger, not contained within the boundaries of the canvas. The artist paints similar elements in several paintings at once, so they are united by common structures, contain and continue each other.
But still, the first thing that is physically felt, pouring from Vlad Kulkov's high canvases is color. His finds of color and composition sometimes seem flawless, like nature itself in its changeable constancy. Colors flare up, fade away, intertwine. Among the grassy green and brown peat, there is blue cobalt, fiery orange, whitening pink, shades of purple. Perhaps such colors do not exist outside the canvas. Or maybe we haven't seen the mountain sunrises of Kazbek and Shkhara and the wild flowers on their slopes. We haven't looked at the iridescent amethyst, the iridescent mother-of-pearl of shells, we haven't watched the color of the sea change throughout the day.
Stop analyzing. Contemplate.
Text by Nadya Oktober
