The artist went on a farewell – Newspaper Kommersant No. 162 (7363) of 09/05/2022

The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center hosts Semyon Faibisovich’s exhibition “Razgulyay. Parting”. It shows for the first time paintings from the Night Razgulay cycle (2013-2016): with them, according to the artist, who moved to live in Israel, he says goodbye to Moscow, which he “loved … and lost”. The more closely Faibisovich peers into the life of the city, the more noticeable the discord with the image of the capital of recent years, believes Igor Grebelnikov.

Think of someone to reproach the artist for partiality, a gloomy, overly critical look at Moscow and Muscovites, nothing will come of it. He does not invent anything, since the 1980s he paints his paintings almost exclusively on the basis of photographs, as befits a photorealist or hyperrealist. There was such a trend in American art in the 1970s, when artists, in search of expressiveness, transferred photographs to canvas, enlarging them to gigantic sizes.

Semyon Faibisovich, according to him, saw such paintings for the first time at an exhibition in the Pushkin Museum in 1975 and was shocked by their similarity with what he himself was doing, then still in graphics. But he did not renounce the chosen method, arguing: “We are doing different things: they demonstrate the language, and I want to speak it, to sort out difficult relationships with life on it.” Indeed, American photorealism is closer to pop art: following photography, these paintings seem to glide over the surface of the visible world, fixing the banal as you like, but then so intently focusing the attention of the audience that they become a little creepy.

In the 1980s, to create paintings, Semyon Faibisovich used his photographs, which capture Soviet realities quite accurately. Kitchen utensils, home furnishings, people on public transport. Where, if not in trains, buses, subways, one could calmly look at the faces of contemporaries. Windows, one way or another present in these paintings, are like additional lenses to those built into the camera. These portraits accurately illustrate the mood of those years when public life seems to have froze, slogans and all the ideological routine no longer mean anything, no one moves, but at the same time it seems to be moving somewhere. Ready-made symbols of stagnation, flying along the rails to a dead end.

With such a picture “Station Sokol” (1985), where a gloomy man with a briefcase seems to be pressed into the seat, and the station, passengers, an oncoming train are visible from the window of the car, an exhibition opens, asking the question “Photorealism?”. And as if to explain the method, which is not at all partial to compatriots, here appear works from the New York Subway cycle, created in the early 1990s with the same attention to the figures of passengers: someone is reading a newspaper, someone is dozing, someone has withdrawn into himself – there is no fundamental difference with the Muscovites, no artistic discoveries.

For several years, Faibisovich even left painting, and when he returned to painting in 2007 – it was already in a country that had proclaimed a course towards stability – he found completely new heroes in Moscow. Yes, the style of writing has changed. Now he was shooting on a smartphone with a digital camera and, by enlarging pixel images to two-meter formats, he did not even try to make up for the inevitable defects in sharpness and color.

He finds new heroes in the same trolleybuses, minibuses, metro, at bus stops. But even if it catches them at the moment of detachment, it is already completely different. Of course, there are also compositionally accurate remakes of paintings from the 1980s, but the boredom of the “scoop” is contrasted with faces with the seal of grief experienced, not even despair, but hopelessness. Among the characters there are quite prosperous youth and cheerful cadets, but it seems that they only create the necessary contrast for a completely new topic for the artist – Moscow as the center of social stratification and trouble.

The never-before-seen “Night Walk” series is based on sloppy shots taken at night, almost deserted. Here the city, with more than once paved sidewalks, with enhanced illumination of buildings and streets, in the context of the artist’s previous works, looks like a battlefield, from which the bodies of the victims have already been removed. The new series naturally continues the earlier works of the Razgulay line, launched in 2008. Semyon Faibisovich worked on it intermittently before leaving Russia and returned in other cycles of the same time. Vagabonds sleeping on benches or begging on the sidewalks, lying bodies, confused migrants, stray dogs (series “Dog’s Life”), station crowds (series “Kazansky V”), drunks in the doorways. If you know the places, you could not photograph something like this in Moscow, but pictures are one thing, two-meter canvases are another, which you can’t dodge at the exhibition. Not without reason, for the thematic proximity of these paintings to the painting of critical realism, Faibisovich’s works were even exhibited in the Tretyakov Gallery in 2019, in a pandan to the Repin retrospective held there. If this exhibition is indeed a farewell, then this is not the farewell of a cold photorealist. There are many feelings and desires in it – not to forget the scary Moscow life, like a nightmare, but to leave us with a strange, but honest image of the capital.