Imagine a southern seaside town: an amusement park and definitely a funhouse - in a hall dyed pink a row of crooked mirrors seems simple and unpretentious compared to the swings that rise and fall from great heights. A boy can not go there without adults, but out of curiosity, he goes in to take a look at the distorted reflections. For Inal Savchenkov a “Funhouse” is exactly that - himself and his childhood memory where he felt a strong sense of bewilderment and disappointment that even an ice-cream bought afterwards could not fix. “I went to the funhouse as a child but it was completely unclear who came out”, - he confesses. Reflecting on this memory Inal concludes: “I came out from there as a painter”. Just like the Russian avant-garde painters, beginning with Kasimir Malevich, who pursued the idea of expressing the fourth dimension through painting, Inal Savchenkov became interested in the theme of multidimensional realms and spatial distortion.
When a sixteen-year-old artist moved from Novorossiysk to Leningrad in 1982 he joined the most modern and progressive young community that had formed around Timur Novikov and the “New Artists” movement. Savchenkov and his friends who became known as a “Novorossiysk group” within this movement used to organise associations and art collectives, one of which in 1987 was named “Kind wizards”. According to the artist, the magic consisted in turning instantly created art into all kinds of benefits and pleasures. Over the years it has become clear that the main miracle that Inal Savchenkov created and continues to create is joy and fun.
Achieving the ability to embody childhood impressions in the fifth decade of one’s creative career is a rare artistic success. As Savchenkov recalls, in seventh grade, after visiting the room of crooked mirrors, he came up with the idea of “spherical television” meaning the broadcasting of a distorted image on the same distorted spherical surface, which results in the picture on the screen appearing natural. If the characters from the well-known poem “There once was a man who was crooked, And walked on a crooked lane…” had a television it would have looked exactly like this. This concept is a forerunner and a prototype of “glitch art” - an artistic trend of the last decade. However, the painter himself calls it “samovar image”. His fantastic invention holds a true philosophical dimension because in a crooked mirror one can attempt to “straighten” human flaws. Perhaps distorted reality can only be described through similarly distorted media, but Savchenkov’s paintings are not mere screenshots from a fictional television screen. His new pictorial series seems to echo the arithmetic rule “A minus times a minus equals a plus”.
The idea of mirror reflection, especially a distorted one, as a separate and often sinister entity dates back to ancient times. It was expressed in myths, folklore, fairy tales, and in our age has been translated onto screens and mass culture. From the very beginning, modernist and avant-garde art has carried with it the image of a “crooked mirror”. All new and unfamiliar paintings were labeled this way by journalists, whether in the pre-revolutionary magazine “Birzhevye vedomosti” or the soviet magazine “Pravda”, which upheld the idea that reflecting reality was a painter’s primary duty. Inal Savchenkov, too, used to ask himself “How is it possible to paint such scribbles all one’s life?”
The main captivating quality of his painting is excitement; immediately recognizable, yet hard-to-define characters are humans, animals and other bizarre creatures that evoke an urge and curiosity to explore what is happening in the images. Perhaps, we are facing a realm where physical laws are alternative and the painter, driven by exploration, reveals this realm to the viewer. Through any mirror new realms open-up - realms that fascinate Savchenkov. Since 1989, together with Franz Rodvalt, an artist from “Arts Engineers” school, he has been applying spatial calculations and formulas to the painted surface. “The longer an artist works on the concept of space, the more kinds of spatial fields they use and the more remain untouched”, - says Inal. Interplanetary travelers or creatures entering our familiar world from other dimensions would not surprise him. The comic book character Doctor Strange who captivates audiences from movie screens is well known to the Saint-Petersburg artist Inal Savchenkov who continues day by day to embody multidimensionality on canvases connecting different realities.
