Real meanings – Weekend – Kommersant

Irina Zatulovskaya (b. 1954) began to participate in Moscow exhibition life only during the perestroika years, when censorship weakened and “wrong” paintings by young artists were no longer removed from exhibitions. It is not surprising that her painting, having had time to harden in battles with exhibition committees, found materials that were rougher than the traditional canvas, and more direct and direct than late Soviet realism, ways of talking about reality.

Text: Anna Tolstova

The unfortunate label “arte povera”, “poor art” stuck to the works of Irina Zatulovskaya. A holey sheet of roofing iron, a peeling panel, a stub of a fence, an old tub lid, a rusted frying pan and even a ribbed washboard – everything here comes into play. The choice of such unartistic materials really reminds of arte povera. But only Italian conceptualists used the rubbish of everyday life for installations and performance, so that if they shake the foundations of the fine arts, then to the very end. Whereas with a Moscow artist, any battered enamel dish becomes the basis for a painting that never thought to die, and that a portrait of Shakespeare is painted on the bottom of the dish is not just for the sake of comic effect. In the end, the dish is a tondo, Shakespeare is an Elizabethan, an Elizabethan portrait miniature is all in these rounded shapes, besides, the brown enamel of the vessel resembles the color of Parmigianino’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, and why shouldn’t two mannerists, a little apart in time, not meet in this cultural (both in everyday and artistic sense) space. No, this is not arte povera, but the “Russian poor”: it is poor in material terms and therefore does not throw anything away – either according to the village custom, or according to the kabakov communal precepts, but spiritually rich.

Poor, everyday materials are what completely fascinates the viewer, and it begins to seem to him that it is enough to find a piece of iron or a piece of wood with a suitable texture so that a bird, a bunny, a blade of grass, a tree, women with braids, a cow with a calf, Eve kissing an apple in the Garden of Eden, or Tsiolkovsky listening to the universe with a giant stethoscope to his ear. The cultural viewer notices that the material dictates the plot to the painter. That an ancient shard washed ashore by a Turkish one fits well with an antique motif, congenial to a Pompeian fresco, a painting from an Egyptian sarcophagus, or an ancient Coptic rag with a gospel scene. And along the edges of the rhombic panel from the door of some esteemed cabinet, all the companions of the Last Supper are successfully seated, since the panel resembles a table overturned at the viewer in an iconic perspective, and by the nature of the surface it resembles an iconic gesso. But even a cultured spectator, having accidentally stumbled upon a “Zatulov” tablet or tin, is ready to carry it to the artist so that she can create a miracle of revealing a hidden image.

According to Zatulovskaya’s memoirs, the transition to simple, rough materials happened in 1987, when at a dacha near Moscow she suddenly saw sheets of iron roofing from a broken barn and felt that these crooked, torn surfaces correspond much more to the pictures of Russian life than clean primed canvases. Following iron, wood, stone, ceramics appeared – solid, in contrast to the trembling, unsteady, no matter how well it was stretched, canvas. Partly in this attraction to hardness, a longing for the fresco appeared, which arose in her early youth, when she copied the then still inaccessible Giotto from albums and reproductions. The handwriting of a born muralist is felt in every stone with a fragment of the gospel story, in every embroidery with Easter symbols. The dream of a fresco ensemble came true in 2020, when Zatulovskaya was commissioned to paint the Intercession Church at the Morozov Children’s Hospital, but the heated iconoclastic discussion did not allow her to complete the plan. The artist was accused of violating the canons and demanded to paint over the frescoes, although in all modern church painting in Russia we will not find another such hand that both Theophanes the Greek and Dionysius would gladly shake.

However, the hardness of the material is also important here according to aesthetic principles, the principles of realism, understood, of course, not in the Marxist-Leninist, but in the medieval philosophical sense: the material reality of the pictorial basis must correspond to reality, the truth of the image created in accordance with Mandelstam’s “perhaps, before a whisper was already born on the lips. For all the airiness of Zatulovskaya’s images – two or three strokes, and now a dove flies out of her open palms, and a flower blossoms, and the Mother of God leans over the body of Christ – there is no virtuoso lightness in them. And the childish immediacy of the impression, which cannot be simulated, is paradoxically combined with a visual experience in which millennia of pictorial activity have been compressed, from Altamira to Kazimir Malevich. It seems that this creative method is akin to Socratic maieutics: the artist, like a midwife, only helps the truth of the image to come into being, and the viewer takes all possible part in obstetric care – it’s not without reason that when you see her works, you yourself want to take up brushes. By the way, she teaches a lot, and recently – to adults who do not have an art education: she teaches them to see the world according to the system of “expanded vision” of Mikhail Matyushin. Here it is impossible not to remember that Zatulovskaya’s grandfather, the artist Sergei Mikhailov, was one of the first teachers of the Moscow Secondary Art School, the teacher of Ilya Kabakov, Eric Bulatov and Geliy Korzhev.

Tondo with Shakespeare is a fragment of a huge gallery, which contains portraits of friends, classics and contemporaries, seen with their own eyes or through the thickness of time, from Grigory Skovoroda, painted, naturally, on an old frying pan, to Venichka Erofeev, painted on a sick, exhausted, as if corroded metal metastases. There are about as many poets among friends as there are artists — the artist and the poet herself, which is found in the Tin Poems series dedicated to Boris Slutsky, who at one time was a former neighbor of Zatulovskaya’s parents in a communal apartment on Neglinka: iron sheets for tin, as Akhmatova puts it, poems Slutsky are interspersed with sheets of her own poems, which she wrote from kindergarten age. Poetry prevented her from working in the specialty received at the Polygraphic Institute: the Malysh publishing house did not accept her first book, in which poetry and pictures were a single whole, the work was rejected for the reason that literature and illustration were under the jurisdiction of different editorial offices. Probably, this failure was a craft of fate, pushing the painter from God to the path of painting.

Zatulovskaya will return to the book much later, almost a quarter of a century later. And to the artist’s book, when, for example, he goes to a psychiatric hospital to Vladimir Yakovlev, who is going “on attack on painting”, and draws him, and he begins to correct the drawings, and as a result, a poetic and pictorial treatise about madness as the engine of the authentic, equal to the love of art. And to Chekhov, Pushkin, Leskov, Veresaev, Prishvin, Platonov, not so much illustrated as appropriated and become part of their own text, just as the world artistic tradition turned out to be appropriated, from Cretan-Mycenaean painting to VKHUTEMAS. Of course, this highly cultured art, which is not at all stylized as a primitive, but has learned to express its thoughts in simple language, involuntarily reflects the world of the Moscow artistic intelligentsia, brought up on the universal collections of the Pushkin Museum, where casts make up for the lack of originals. However, the artist does not get tired of repeating that in the dispute between art for art’s sake and art for life, she takes the side of life: this is her loyalty to painting, because even Dahl’s word “painting” is derived from the word “life”.

At the same time, it is difficult to recall another artist who would have been so fascinated by the images of death as Irina Zatulovskaya, since even old brushes, swaddled like mummies, according to the Egyptian funeral rite, turn into her memento mori. No one else turns so often to the almost forgotten genre of the deathbed portrait today. The two main pictorial cycles, evangelical and peasant-village, imperceptibly flowing into one another, so that even a naked person under a shower in a bathhouse looks overshadowed by Tabor’s light, revolve endlessly around an incomprehensible theme, which, however, is prescribed by traditions. However, the sadness that permeates this elegiac art is bright, because both the Gospel and the epic of peasant-village life, tied to seasonal cycles, talking about death, speak of resurrection. The service of an artist is the work of resurrecting the dead; Pavel Fedotov, Velimir Khlebnikov, Pavel Kuznetsov, Mikhail Matyushin, and Vladimir Yakovlev come to life on unsightly planks and tins. And the “Mummy of the Brushes” look from the shelf in the workshop like resurrected Lazarus.

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Masterpiece
“Space”
Board, oil. 2020

A whole series of “spaces” is based on the discovery made by Irina Zatulovskaya in 2020: the word “space” has 12 letters, which means they fit perfectly on the dial instead of a banal number. Perhaps no one else – neither the avant-garde, who dreamed of conquering the fourth dimension, nor the conceptual art, which checked against the progress of Joseph Kossuth’s “Three Hours”, could turn space into time so simply and gracefully. Of course, Zatulovskaya has a very special sense of humor, she is always happy to play charades with the viewer, for example, drawing “silence” in gold on an antique pottery, and “word” in silver. However, while laughing at yet another joke of a seemingly ingenuous conceptualist, one should not forget that the artist’s pedagogical methodology, which goes back to the theories of the Russian avant-garde, was also based on Pavel Florensky’s VKhutemas lectures on the space-time continuum. And when she says that she would dream of releasing a batch of wristwatches with “space”, we understand that it is not so much about economic benefits, but about geopolitical ambitions – to catch up and overtake the ever-late “chairmen of the globe”.

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