The wife of the artist Yevgeny Gorokhovsky spoke about the mysterious fate of the magical realist

Siberian introvert

Zhenya started drawing as a child, here are his early drawings. They were shown at his first solo exhibition in 1964 at the Chekhov Library in Moscow. Then Zhenya’s father, Eduard Semenovich Gorokhovsky, sent his works to the children’s writer, literary critic Vladimir Glotser, who was the secretary of Marshak and Chukovsky and studied children’s creativity. He appreciated the work of the young artist, as a result, an exhibition was held, – says Lyudmila Gorokhovskaya, showing still lifes that could well be mistaken for the work of a mature master. Here is a city outside the window, cut out of geometric figures-buildings in cloudy yellow, earthy and dark green shades of color, and in front of it is a window sill with vases of synonymous shapes and shades. And here is a still life with a teapot that seems to glow from the inside with heat, transferring its warmth to the surrounding objects – a bowl of fruit and a jug. It seems that the objects in these drawings live their own lives, breathe, think and feel. Not to mention the fact that color, composition, volume – everything is sustained, finished and realized in avant-garde traditions. It’s hard to believe that we have the work of a 13-year-old boy. And already here it is felt that a certain symbolic code is embedded in the objects in the drawings. After a while, the innate talent is realized in the theater, and then in independent paintings, which some art critics will attribute to neo-symbolism.

Zhenya was born in Odessa when his parents were in their first year. And then they moved to Novosibirsk – according to the distribution after the institute, both of them were architects, – Lyudmila Gorokhovskaya continues the story. – In Novosibirsk, Zhenya graduated from high school, after which he left Moscow to enter the Moscow Art Theater School and get the profession of stage designer. After graduation, in 1973 he returned to Novosibirsk and began working at the local Krasny Fakel Drama Theatre, one of the leading theaters in Siberia. In 1978, he was invited to the Maly Theater to design a play based on the play by A.N. Ostrovsky “Handsome Man”. These sketches of costumes and scenery are now kept in the collection of the Vladimir Dahl Museum. He worked with various theaters throughout the country: Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Grozny, Bryansk, Yaroslavl, Nizhny Novgorod, Smolensk … He designed about sixty performances.

– Why did you decide to leave the theater for free swimming?

– Zhenya said that the theater was a dead end story for him. The theater is a team, and he was an introvert, a loner. It was one thing to work with the director, to discuss the decision of the performance, and when the artistic council began, when he had to make a speech and defend his work, it was difficult for him. He believed that he had already said everything with his work. In 1990 he left the theater. From 1989 to 2009, he worked as a research assistant at the A3 Gallery, but devoted most of his time to painting.

– And when did you meet and get married?

We met when we were 27 years old. I am also from Novosibirsk. In the same years as Zhenya, she studied at the Pedagogical Institute, at the Faculty of History and Philology. We formalized our relationship only in the early 90s.

How was your relationship with your father?

– Differently. Eduard Semenovich in 1974 decided to move to Moscow. I had to divorce my wife, otherwise it was impossible in Soviet times. To move, he got married. His first wife Lidia Alekseevna was very worried, she fell ill; she died in the arms of Eduard Semenovich, who often came to Novosibirsk. Zhenya loved his mother very much and, of course, was very upset by her departure.

Eduard Semenovich was a free man… He was an artist first of all, and then everything else. Some kind of stone lay on Zhenya’s heart after the death of his mother, but he tried not to talk about it. He forgave his father. They continued to maintain a relationship throughout their lives. Zhenya is his only son. He came to visit his father when he moved to Moscow, and met Ilya Kabakov there. The last time they met was in Frankfurt just before the death of Eduard Semenovich. Father spoke well of Zhenya’s work, but advised to go to exhibitions more often, believed that it was necessary to look more at what others were doing, to cook in an artistic environment. And Zhenya was different, he loved solitude. We in the family affectionately called him “our Taoist.” There was something oriental in his face, it was also guessed in the features of his mother. He was always keenly interested in Eastern philosophy, which manifested itself in his painting. He was very calm about everything, even if it was difficult inside, he always had everything “good” …

– Eduard Gorokhovsky is a world-famous artist. How much did the father and his circle of friends influence his son in terms of art?

– Ilya Kabakov influenced more than others. Eduard Semenovich and Ilya Iosifovich lived in the same cooperative house at the River Station. Zhenya was there. He never recalled any specific episodes, but said that everything in Kabakov shocked him: the manner of reasoning, ideas, texts. We have preserved the paradoxical story of Ilya Kabakov. If I didn’t know who the author was, I would have thought it was Chekhov. Kabakov was the second person who had a serious impact on Zhenya’s worldview. And the first person who influenced him was Nikolai Gritsuk, a Novosibirsk artist who started as a realist and ended up with abstract works.

Philosophy between light and shadow

Adult works by Yevgeny Gorokhovsky are full of mysterious allusions. A completely realistic, understandable, almost photographic background depicting a cloudy sky, a temple or a street is covered with a geometric pattern in which the subconscious reads the hidden symbolism. Absolutely real, amazingly accurate images are combined with fantasy, almost dreamlike. Most often in his paintings, Gorokhovsky depicts the sky, the clear blue of which is covered with clouds, in which someone’s incredible eyes, mysterious silhouettes or just a mood created by a whirlwind are guessed.

— In the titles of Evgeny Gorokhovsky’s exhibitions, the word “interval” often appears. The latter was called “Ascension Interval”, and this word was often found in the title of the paintings: “Premonition Interval”, “Experience Intervals”, “Overcoming Interval”. What did this word mean to him?

– A recent exhibition in Erarta was called “Between Light and Shadow” – here it is also about the interval, only in other words. He needed intervals to think about the work. Zhenya worked slowly, often writing at night. He read and thought a lot before doing something on canvas, but he never made sketches, sketches. The most important thing can be said in a pause, “between the lines.” The intervals helped the idea mature on a subconscious level. Here, for example, is a portrait of his eldest daughter Alice, painted in 2016, when 10 years later she first came to us in Spain. The painting is called “Earth and Sky mix their energies.” The author’s intention is explained here by the symbolism of Heaven and Earth: in ancient Chinese philosophy, they are assigned to the archetypes YANG-YIN, corresponding to the male and female energies. And water/rain is an ancient universal symbol of purity, fertility and the source of life itself.

– Alice is not your common daughter? How is it that they haven’t seen each other for 10 years?

– Life. It happened. Alice and her mother lived in Lithuania, then she grew up and got married, went to America. She never lived with Zhenya, but she was always our close friend. Our common daughter Zhenechka is now 42 years old, Alice is 46 years old, and they communicate well with each other.

— And how did you get to Spain?

Zhenya married a Spaniard in 2009 and moved to Seville. We visited her often. Sometimes they rented an apartment for several months. In 2012-2013, my husband had two exhibitions – in Madrid and Seville. That’s why we stayed there. And in 2014, several turning points happened at once. First, our grandson Isaac was born. And then, on the last day of 2014, right before the New Year, Zhenya broke his femoral neck. He just sat for a long time, then got up and suddenly fell. Turned out to be a fracture. In 2015, there was a difficult operation and a long recovery. At this time, I was engaged in my grandson, and he began to describe his work, to make explanations for the paintings. So we ended up in Spain. Once, in 2016, we were walking near the Atlantic Ocean, and suddenly a black haze gathered in a clear, clear sky in a second. We were shocked, I took a few photos on the phone, and Zhenya wrote the work “Revelation in a Thunderstorm and a Storm.”

“There is such a strong tension in it, light and darkness, fear and hope, some kind of foreboding… What is it about?”

Zhenya had a lot of premonitions in general. He called himself a “mystical artist”, a magical realist, although experts interpret his work in different ways, call it hyperrealism, and find connections with symbolism and surrealism. Sometimes he took a drawing or a photograph from a newspaper and reworked it, it was important not what he drew, but what he wanted to say. All his works were deeply thought out, and many responded to life in some non-obvious way.

Was he inspired by Rene Magritte?

Magritte was one of his favorite artists. Zhenya read books on oriental philosophy, we have many albums with oriental ornaments, which he included in his paintings. He paid special attention to astrology. This year – the Rabbit – is his year, so I decided to make it an anniversary, organize exhibitions and start working on a book. I still can’t believe he’s no longer in this world…

How did it happen that he got sick?

– We just recovered from this story with the femoral neck, returned to Moscow. In the spring of 2020, Zhenya’s solo exhibition was to be held at the Pop / off / art gallery, for which he wrote new works. Even covid did not prevent the opening – the exhibition opened online. But in the summer we planned to return to Spain, so we decided to get vaccinated … I think the doctor who gave the injection infected him. After the second vaccination, he fell ill. They cured of the coronavirus, but the consequences began – the heart could not stand it …

– Was he buried in Spain?

– Yes … It took a whole year to bring everything to the end – to register the land for the cemetery, to make a monument. Now I have returned to Moscow and live here. I take care of my husband’s affairs, I continue to prepare students for the exam in literature. I’m a philologist, I worked for many years in a gymnasium, taught Russian language and literature. In general, somehow I move, but all the time I think about Zhenya. Yesterday I had a dream. He squeezes blue paint onto a small canvas, and I tell him: “Zhenya, why so much, they said in the store that there will be no more royal blue.” Royal blue is his favorite color, the color of the sky.

– The grandson is very similar to Eugene. Did he inherit painting talent?

– I want to believe … But so far he is only eight and a half, and he cannot decide who to become – a pianist (like his mother) or an artist. Zhenya worked with him a lot and would like to do more, but fate decreed otherwise. Isaito, as we call him, is interested in his grandfather’s work. Recently I made a report about him at school, and when asked how many works my grandfather wrote, he answered without hesitation: a thousand. Indeed, if we count together with theatrical sketches, then even more come out, of which there are about three hundred picturesque paintings.