Artist Igor Novikov compared himself with Malevich and explained why Europeans are annoyed by Russian art

– Explain the message that you put into the selection of peasant field paintings. What was your original idea?

– Just like Malevich, I come into contact with nature and people living in nature. I often spend the summer in the village of Drovoseki near Vladimir, and therefore I conceived a series of works dedicated to the man of our middle zone, the Russian hinterland. How does it coexist with the surrounding world, with space? These questions interested me.

– Approximately how long did it take to create a new cycle?

– I write works quickly. The most difficult thing is to catch the wave, to catch the impulse. I enter levitation with my characters to experience the world as samsara. In April I will have a large exhibition at the Museum of Nonconformism in Moscow, with Nadya Brykina, with whom we have been collaborating for 40 years. And I’m getting ready now, because I will need to create new works.

I don’t draw cubes, squares, I don’t cut canvases, I don’t climb on Mayakovsky, I don’t nail a causal place to the paving stones on Red Square. I am an artist who conveys the time in which I live. This is my essence – to show my contemporary. I am a prophet, and many of my paintings and themes are prophetic and scandalous.

– Which of the great masters-predecessors serves as a model for you?

– There are no samples for me, I came up with my own style – pictogram figures. They are a code with which I reveal what I have seen in dreams, in different places, and so on.

I’ve been creating pictograms for forty years. And today you see them everywhere: in stores and in newspapers. I was told that before we had “M” and “F” written on our toilets, but now they have figures.

– Tell us about your creativity in development.

– I started, of course, with political things. During “Perestroika”, in the 80s, “Furmanny Lane” (Novikov was at the origins of this phenomenon, – I.V.) became the center of the avant-garde. But at the same time, I graduated from the Surikov Institute and studied at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. I am a professional, which is what an artist should be, and not like this: today you play the drum, tomorrow you go to the shop to chop meat, and then you draw. I studied for 17 years, my father is an artist – what more can I say! And, by the way, whether you are a professional or an amateur is always immediately obvious.

– What is the technology for creating your “standard” painting?

– Let me explain once again: when you walk, you don’t think about how your feet walk on the asphalt? Or when you look somewhere, you don’t comprehend what your eyes are doing? My professionalism is so sharpened as to capture the cosmic impulse and depict it.

And you can teach anyone to draw in five years. Many people say about themselves: I am a composer. But they are performers – nothing more. You can count the number of composers on one hand. And I’m a composer. I don’t just copy a birch tree, a hut or an old woman with a cow. This is funny to me. My task is to compress time into a vacuum and splash it onto the canvas, to find this “particle of God”, the Higgs Boson.

– “Men” have become your trademark?

– Yes, this is a sign. Many began to make stairs after me. Shemyakin stole this idea from me, Erik Bulatov makes “EXIT”, which I came up with several years ago. And it so happened that euthanasia in Switzerland is also called a “way out”.

– Igor Alekseevich, we understand the logic of people of literature and art in the “perestroika” time. The majority set themselves the goal of dismantling the Soviet system. But I see motives coming from there in your work today, although we are in a new legal and political situation.

– We used to be blind kittens. When the pre- and post-perestroika avant-garde appeared, I realized that it was working towards the collapse of art. We had a powerful school, and many realist artists, after the only traveling Sotheby’s auction was held in Moscow in 1988, the next day everyone “rebuilt.” These were slow-witted individuals, excuse me, who thought only about self-interest. “The works of Grisha Bruskin are sold for five dashes and 400 thousand pounds? That’s it, you need to quickly become an abstractionist!” – so they thought.

At the same time, our artists in the USSR lived very well, they had their own workshops, and luxurious ones at that. When I went abroad for the first time, to Holland, Italy, Switzerland, they looked at our artists there with surprise.

We brought large canvases, and they asked: “Are you painting with oil paints?” We say: “Yes.” – “On canvases? And is this for sale? “Yes,” we answer.

Few people abroad can say that they live off art. Why do you think pop art appeared? Because there is no money, and they climb through garbage bins – like Beuys, who brought garbage to the museum and became famous. Well, since you brought it, well, two. I drew a square, a triangle, shouted at the TV, made a ticker. What next? It was interesting in the 20s. But why repeat? When I studied at the Rietwald Academy, I became bored precisely because of this – and I left.

– I see your picture of a bear, which is an obvious reference to a famous party brand, copulating with a car. It seems that this is a form of expressing a creative concept, as they say, on the edge.

– This is how I show how they attacked the poor domestic auto industry.

– Aren’t you afraid that some patriotic activists, seeing metaphors they don’t understand, will write a complaint against you?

– Many jobs may have problems. I remade Vereshchagin in such a way that the work turned out to be prophetic.

– What about the picture where the pictogram man breaks off the cross from the dome of St. Basil’s Cathedral?

– I am not against Orthodoxy, but I am interested in history and I know that for five or six centuries the old – the Vedic culture – was destroyed, people were blinded, driven into the Dnieper, killed… But history is written by the victors – this should always be remembered.

– So this is a deliberate anti-Christian gesture?

– When Lenin came to power, there were no crosses or domes – I captured this period, but only in the “perestroika” vein, when everyone (party bosses) suddenly became Orthodox. I am a patriot, I think about Russia, about the Russian martyred people, about the great experiment on them that has lasted 500 years. I don’t laugh – I cry, sadly looking at what is happening around.

– For you as an artist, a hypertrophied, maximally simplified symbol is of great importance, like, say, a glass, which means “fragile” on the packaging of goods. Why is Soviet aesthetics so important?

– I grew up in Soviet times. Fate was divided in such a way that thirty years passed under socialism, thirty under capitalism. And, of course, I live socialist and capitalist dreams. But the second ones are a nightmare. And an artist is like a child, he is easy to offend.

In Switzerland, no one cares that you don’t have money—go clean the toilets.

– Do you now spend more time in Russia or in Switzerland?

– After the annexation of Crimea, Russian art, and everything Russian, irritates Europeans. There is terrible nationalism in Switzerland. If they don’t want to see the Bolshoi Theater, what can we say about the poor artists. All auction houses are closed to us, there are no Russian auctions, and I often exhibited in London and New York. I like my work, of course, but hostility towards Russians and ignorance take over.

But I only like to exhibit in museums, so I began to do more exhibitions in Russia, and in provincial cities: Tver, Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Tula, Ples, Ryazan, Kazan – everywhere, and not just in the Tretyakov Gallery. But I love the province; communicating with people gives me new ideas. This is better than locking yourself in a workshop, drinking vodka, throwing bottles at the wall and shouting that you are a genius. I work a lot.