The exhibition “I Live On. Artist’s Laboratory” by Erik Bulatov

The Multimedia Art Museum (MAMM) opened its doors after a major renovation that lasted a year and a half. The building’s engineering systems were replaced, the floors, foundation, facades were repaired, the rotten roof was dismantled and a new one was erected (they are now planning to hold events on it), and a spacious museum store opened in the underground floor. In the newly opened museum, you can see eight exhibitions at once: they covered Russian and foreign photography (both old and new), as well as contemporary art. About the most long-awaited of them – “I live on. Artist’s Laboratory” Eric Bulatova – says Igor Grebelnikov.

Erik Bulatov has long been a recognized classic. Recognition in the West came to him during the perestroika years as a representative of unofficial Soviet art – the first exhibitions, at the Kunsthalle Basel and at the Pompidou Center in Paris, were held in 1988. Even earlier, in 1977, a reproduction of his painting “Horizon”, with the horizon line of a seascape covered by a red stripe of an order ribbon, was on the poster of the main project of the Venice Biennale, dedicated to dissent in the art of the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries.

Bulatov’s paintings gained success among Western collectors, and later even greater success among Russian ones, which eventually opened the way for them to Russian museums. The first retrospective of Bulatov in his homeland took place at the Tretyakov Gallery in 2006, and for the artist’s 80th birthday in 2014, a large exhibition was held in the Moscow Manege. Now his paintings hang in the permanent exhibition “Art of the 20th Century” in the New Tretyakov Gallery, and from those that are in private collections, it is easy to collect a spectacular digest of creativity – as was the case last November at Bulatov’s exhibition in the Warehouses in Nizhny Novgorod, dedicated to 90th anniversary (the artist celebrated it on November 5 in Paris, where he has lived for more than thirty years).

Back in the 70s, Bulatov managed to find his theme and remain faithful to it, despite the change in artistic “fashions” and changes in the political climate: perestroika, outlandish painting from a closed country for decades, was one thing, the rise of globalization with its almost transparent borders, and the third is today. But his paintings are true to themselves, they are instantly recognizable: we say “Bulatov” – and immediately imagine a landscape or clouds that seem to be dissected by words that lead the eye into the depths of the canvas. Or they, written frontally, on the contrary, block our view, as in the famous canvas “Glory to the CPSU” (1975), where the words of the Soviet mantra are written in red over the blue sky: the picture then looked like sheer sedition, although the artist only indicated the surface of the canvas with an inscription, and the sky – its illusory depth.

In those years, it was fundamentally important for Bulatov to reveal in one picture the coexistence of two spaces: social and, let’s say, eternal. But the completely false Soviet life of the times of “developed socialism”, which exposed itself, is one thing, and another thing is the new times, when Bulatov’s formula of the picture as a place of confrontation between two spaces has not lost its relevance at all, even if the words “freedom” “fly into the sky” ”, “I’m walking”, “hope”, phrases from the poems of his friend the poet Vsevolod Nekrasov “I live – I see”, “clouds are growing”, “how the clouds go – how things go.”

The exhibition at MAMM, named after one of these paintings – “I Live On,” poses the ambitious task of showing the classic from a new side – first of all, as a virtuoso draftsman: we are talking mainly about sketches and preparatory materials for paintings. Which may seem somewhat strange, since there are so many words and phrases in Bulatov’s paintings, but compositionally they are arranged in a similar way. However, he is one of those artists with classical painting training (Surikov Institute) who did not discard his skills at all, but applied them to clarify his relationship with the painting.

There are only seven paintings, but dozens of very different drawings – from life sketches to various kinds of sketches and approaches to themes: “an artist’s laboratory,” as the exhibition curator Olga Sviblova defined the format of the exhibition. There is even a pencil replica of his famous painting “Horizon” (1972), drawn ten years later. The drawings are grouped next to the paintings and, due to the difference in scale, produce a strong effect; after all, artists are not often ready to present the viewer with the “pangs of creativity.”

Everything that in Bulatov’s paintings took a finished form, ideal for museum walls and the art market, here appears as a living process, almost as alchemy.

Especially when the phrases in the sketches do not simply mark the perspective or depth of space, but become something like characters, living beings, straightening their unexpected position in order to get closer to the viewer’s consciousness. Nekrasov’s phrase “That’s it,” first written in black letters on a white background, flies over the conventional horizon and returns from there in white on a pitch-black background. Between the pencil sketch and the painting of this painting (they hang side by side) there are two years, although sometimes the search for the composition of the painting can take longer.

This turns out to be terribly interesting to watch. The phrase “I wanted to do it before dark, but I didn’t have time” is captivating over the snow-covered view from the window of Bulatov’s Moscow studio: one of the options, where “I didn’t have time” seemed to lie on the windowsill, seems even more successful than the final version. The artist, of course, knows better: Bulatov says that a pencil drawing and an oil painting are constructed differently and it is the foreground that is important.

Judging by the drawings, it took several years to find how to compose the phrase “Clouds are growing” against the backdrop of a stormy sky: the artist placed them frontally, diagonally, increasing the size and color of the letters, until he settled on a version where this phrase is read from an upturned position to the sky of the head, and this “-here” appears directly above the viewer’s eyes. Here, willy-nilly, you are imbued with a dizzying perspective – one of those techniques that, according to Sviblova, brings Bulatov’s somersaults of words and images closer to the practice of Russian avant-garde artists. Of course, the constructivists had much more specific goals than the artist, who for years tried on the poetic lines of his friend to the infinity of the sky or landscape, but nevertheless Bulatov’s paintings made a certain revolution in the viewer’s vision and consciousness. Through the drawings – and many of them look like completely independent works, even more radical than the paintings, due to the nakedness of their ideas (which also brings them closer to the graphics of the avant-garde artists) – lessons are taught about these magical transformations of words into images, reality into poetry, feelings into beauty ( Bulatov’s sketches from nature – landscapes, flowers, portraits of his wife – a special pleasure for lovers of classical drawing) in the exhibition “laboratory” are easily assimilated. And certainly the viewer can feel himself on the same wavelength with the master before his works of the most recent years. This is the phrase “Everything is not so scary” (2022), written in different ways, including frightening ones with its aggressive graphics, and the drawing “Enough!” (2023), which looks like an homage to Suprematism: against the background of a black square, two figures float – a white word and a scarlet exclamation mark.