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Vasily Shulzhenko: New Paintings
Maya Polsky Gallery Vasily Shulzhenko: New Paintings will be showing at Maya Polsky Gallery through July 30, 2003. Executed in a classical, Old Master tradition, the works of this contemporary Moscow artist range from burlesque to despair in a vision both distinctly Russian, and resonant of a wider perceptivity of social folly. There is a pessimistic quality to Shulzhenko's distempered palette, a grimy realism, a slow ruination. And there are neither heroes, nor Gods: Napoleon Bonaparte is a naked bedroom figure, his passions a burlesque; and the figures of Western classicism are peasants and laborers. Yet despite the decay, the enervation, Shulzhenko's characters -- where they have retained their sanity -- endure. These twelve works are both character sketches and allegory. And they are very human. Charon Waiting (oil on canvas: 70-3/8" x 62-1/2": 2002) presents a complex image, one which American audiences may see primarily as an intriguing quotation of the Greek ferryman, carrier of the shades of the dead over the River Styx into Paradise, as a blunt-featured laborer. With its Old Master handling and the jewel-like reflectivity of its oils Shulzhenko has created a powerful and captivating work on this basis alone. The subject is sensitively realized, gruff with common sense and maintaining the only optimism in the picture, a patient, even philosophical acceptance of his position. The decay of his derelict barge and the piles of swamped, sinking refuse are rendered in a rich palette of rust-red and ochre, and a thick impasto that enhances the feel of peeling paint and the roughness of scaling rust. A background with distinct classical overtones recedes into the distance, enigmatically and uniformly a scene of dilapidated ruin -- not the romantic antiquarian ruin of, for instance, the skeletal arches of old abbeys or the centuries-old soundness of Roman construction, but a scene of disrepair, corrosion, an almost post-apocalyptic consumption. Near and far, all is rusting, peeling, swamped and sinking. Charon lies full length on the pilot house of his derelict barge, waiting... for what? In part his inertia seems due to a lack of authority, a failure of civil organization which has led to an inevitable decay. Charon Waiting could as well be an image of the American Great Depression, a picture of economic failure. But there is further content here. For Russia, Western classicism is an importation, a veneer, applied originally by autocracy and brute force as royalty and later, Socialism, strove by sheer force of will to thrust the massive Russian nation -- sleepy, medieval, Byzantine -- wholesale into Western-style modernity. As in an earlier work, Venus of Moscow (1998), where the classical goddess was portrayed as a husky peasant female, Charon in Charon Waiting is not a slender Greek ideal but a rough-featured rustic. Aside from the many musings here -- the riverman's inertia, the ferryboat as an inactive scow, the source of the relentless decay -- Shulzhenko's repeated quoting of Greek classicism via realistic Russian characters suggests that it has, perhaps, only held root where it can adopt forms with deeper reference. The Atlantes (oil on canvas: 78-1/8" x 58-1/2": 2002), a revisiting of an earlier 'caryatid' theme, weaves into the classical citing a further allusion to Russian social history. Four figures form a cat's-cradle of near and far, past and present. Caryatids in ancient Greece were the forms of women, refined and formal, serving as supporting architectural columns. Titanic in size, Shulzhenko portrays The Atlantes (derived from 'Atlas', condemned to eternally support the heavens) as two bent, weary, sweaty workmen, half-stripped to the waist in their labors. They endure a wearying half-bent position as they bear up the stone vault of a massive neoclassical arch. The mighty figure on the left eyes the viewer, inscrutable, enduring... watchful; the one on the right has his eyes closed in fatigue. Again, as with Charon Waiting, while there is content on its own, The Atlantes also seems to make a specifically Russian reference, to the artificially Palladian, Western-style city built by Peter the Great in 1712, St. Petersburg (Leningrad). It was the beginning of Russia's modernization -- Peter sought a city as great as any in Europe -- and numberless peasants died, building an emperor's folly: a city built on the site of a fever-ridden swamp, a seaport locked uselessly in ice half the year. Russians, it is said, consider Moscow 'home' and St. Petersburg, like the Classical mythology arrived and enforced as an import, something not of their native ken. The Atlantes plays with such allusions by introducing a modern twist, two characters very much from the present day. In the reddish light of the foreground, crouching unconcerned at the feet of the two titans, a little boy examines something that has caught his eye on the ground. Distantly seen through the tunnel of the arch is a glimpse of tidy modern side street, where a pudgy tourist stands in billed cap, t-shirt and blue jean shorts. The little black-haired boy with his interest in the rubble found in the forecourt formed by the Atlantes is one of the few suggestions of rebirth and continuation in these works; the tourist and tidy street suggest a modern veneer that seeks to ignore the social difficulties embodied in the titanic figures: the burden of history, and a modern indifference. Strength and power are dissipated or absent in Vasily Shulzhenko: New Paintings. Where they are present is either a fantasy, or a parody. The inertia of Charon Waiting and the enigma of The Atlantes are contrasted with the bearded ferocity of The Cossack (oil on canvas: 78-1/4" x 25-1/4": 2002). High above a vertiginous drop into a refuse-filled alley, the lively, hairy, sabre-waving figure, brightly lit on his spirited bay horse, goads his mount into a mad clattering jump over the Russian city's rooftops. His romantic ferocity flickers on the canvas, luminous with fantasy, to be gone in an instant. Whatever the cossack may represent -- energy and ferocity, psychological vitality, hope and imagination -- it is mere fantasy. The canyon of impoverished alley below, where two unaware figures dicker and third, famished face looks up, is the true, persistent, oppressive reality. Napoleon Bonaparte is another recurring image in Shulzhenko's work, shown in past paintings as a bleakly staring Sphinx freezing in the snow, or arm's folded in a little-boy grump, sitting in a bathtub with a toy soldier on his knee. In Napoleon's New Conquest (oil on canvas: 43-1/8" x 27-3/8": 2003) Shulzhenko makes of him a virile lampoon. The stocky Corsican is a heroic nude, save for his military hat (!). Feet planted, broad Rabelaisian buttocks half-turned toward the viewer, with parade nobility and eagle stare of smoldering command the mighty Emperor of France seizes, he conquers! -- conquers a giggling, bare-breasted Josephine, whose rapt swoon makes the work all the more a burlesque.
Burlesque borders on menace in Circus in the Courtyard (oil on canvas: 78" x 61-3/4": 2002). In this vision there is all the terror of losing control, of being, even arbitrarily, caught up in the forces of petty authority. The tight quarters of the courtyard press forward the crush of bodies, which threaten to tumble out into the viewer's space in all their grotesque hilarity. The panicked horse and agonized clown add a note of terror to the circus bedlam; the too-wide lipsticked grin of the elephant rider has a predatory air. Otherwise, lunacy and thuggishness vie in this vision of petty authority. Palette of distempered mustard-yellows. The viewer may well feel he has opened the door of a Pandora's Box, a riot of malice and madness. The powerful crush of bodies and the presence of the elephant in the background hint that he may not easily close it. From face to face there is no sympathetic character, except, perhaps for the 'Red Clown' in the lower left; he seems the only sane presence amid the lunacy, his frizzed wig and tattered clown suit a protective adaptation, but he is spent, his red nose and glazed stare suggestive of a drunkard. And yet Shulzhenko avoids caricature. In part based on his sensitive oil rendering of the figures, they resemble but never quite become a Jungian delirium of creatures from the unconscious: there is a solidity and a reality here that creates each individual, even the mad ones, as a solid, deeply-felt persona. Flanking Circus in the Courtyard, two related works focus on select characters from the dysfunctional carnival. In The Muscleman (oil on canvas: 47-1/8" x 39-1/8": 2003) the burly central figure of Circus in the Courtyard who with his shaven head and striped pants seems part prison convict, is a sterotypical 'Russian strongman' in body-stocking and with twinkling eye and handlebar moustache. He seems a full-sized bear of a man in The Muscleman, hefting his two companions, the midget and the dwarf; but looking between Circus in the Courtyard and The Muscleman one sees that he is himself of short stature. The midget who in The Muscleman raises high a glass, himself togged out as a diminutive general, reappears in Circus in the Courtyard in fools-cap with a concertina, a jester; while the dwarf in the bowler hat shifts from homely good-nature in The Muscleman to a cruel thuggishness in Circus in the Courtyard. Likewise the 'Red Clown' and 'White Clown' in Red and White Clowns (oil on canvas: 58-5/8" x 38-3/4": 2002), who present themselves as buffoons in this work, while having more sinister presences in Circus in the Courtyard. Like Goya's Caprichos, Shulzhenko illustrates these dwarves and grotesques as commentary -- political, perhaps (they do resemble rowdy party members), but certainly on the inner grotesqueries and malformations of which humanity is capable. The shifts of mood and intent among this particular grouping lend resonances to all three paintings, and it is one of the highlights of this showing to see these three together. Shulzhenko's social realities, imaginatively illustrated, captivate and disturb. Some persist uneasily in this Albright-like realm of dilapidation and decay; others have given way to despair. The figure in Resting Clown (oil on canvas: 62-3/4" x 46-7/8": 2002) could possibly be the tortured clown in the upper left of Circus in the Courtyard, but in theme this work groups itself with Charon Waiting and The Atlantes: a resigned acceptance of bleak reality. In Resting Clown Shulzhenko highlights not the clown persona but the man beneath, maintaining a weary dignity despite the greasepaint, the ludicrous frizz of his hair, the absurd buffoon-suit with its polka-dots and red pompons. Resting Clown offers the viewer a look part-wary, part-friendly: a man who, simply, endures -- endures his particolored costume, and the vulnerable seat on the braid of a tightrope strung high in the air above city rooftops. Where Resting Clown endures, the unnamed ferryman in Ferryman Playing a Recorder (oil on canvas: 27-7/8" x 35-1/4": 2003) is not as fortunate. Hopelessness has overtaken the man in the tiny boat, his recorder numbly at his lips, unplayed, and seeming to give cold comfort; his eyes dull, bereft of focus. The ugly, crushing despair expresses, perhaps, the artist's own horror of suffering. As in Charon Waiting the deserted avenue is flooded, clogged with piles of unsinking refuse. Ferryman Playing a Recorder represents a wholesale failure of spirit; the decay of the surroundings has seeded its dry rot in the human heart. The Chess Player (oil on canvas: 58-1/2" x 70-1/2": 1994), an earlier work included in this exhibition, draws on cliches of the now-dissolved USSR. The massive male of the title sits on the ground, in a dismal, snowy landscape, divested of force and use, a figure of lost puissance. With big hands dangling strengthless and grim mouth downturned, the figure turns the unfocused brunt of his idiot gaze upon the viewer: two whitish balls of cataracted eyes. Donald Kuspit, in his introduction to the catalogue for Shulzhenko's 1995 exhibition, called The Chess Player "an idiot... as he sits, absurdly, in the snow in a railroad yard, playing chess with himself -- trying to beat himself as he freezes to death." Yet there is power in the idiocy, a sense of lingering danger in the sheer massiveness of the figure. Is he defunct, or a subtle menace? The presence of the chess board recalls chess-playing Death in Ingmar Bergman's classic 1959 film The Seventh Seal, and there is a sense that, idiot power granted, one would hesitate to take hold of any of the pieces in an opening gambit. Such complexity is one of the pleasures of these works: they reward repeated looking, and always provide more to see. A final footnote is Old House (oil on canvas: 33-3/4" x 45-1/4": 1989-2001), an intriguing look into the artist's earlier work, as well as one begun before the fall of Socialism in 1991. In this intimate, strongly post-Impressionist landscape work the riverside shack slumps and sags, a portrait of inanimate depression. It prefigures the architectural emptiness Shulzhenko evokes in this current exhibition, where empty windows, peeling paint, and general ruin suggest civil disorder, inertia, inability to muster repair materials or manpower; or, more symbolically, the failing veneer of these Palladian, Western-style buildings. Throughout Vasily Shulzhenko: New Paintings a pervasive malaise is given form in dilapidated surroundings, a threatening, omnipresent force that infuses daily existence. Until the Soviet Union fell in 1991, Shulzhenko, like other Russian artists, did not have freedom to paint as he wished. It is to our lasting enrichment that we can now enjoy his work. Vasily Shulzhenko: New Paintings reveals the continued staying power of the artist's expression. Amid these visions of distemper, jesters and folly, Shulzhenko's imaginative realism draws each character as a solid, deeply-felt individual. They are malign, spent, or mad; or patient, enduring, and in them is both allegory of human experience, and Shulzhenko's insights of the paradoxes of contemporary Russia itself. From burlesque to despair, twelve large-scale oil canvases show the artist's keen perception, at times scathing, at times mercifully tempered, always resting on an uneasy borderline between fable and deep humanity. These works reward the viewer with a dark, yet deeply thoughtful vision. They are well worth seeing. Although a catalogue has not been issued specifically for Vasily Shulzhenko: New Paintings, color catalogues for two earlier Maya Polsky exhibitions by the artist may be purchased at the gallery. Priced at $10.00 each, they feature a generous sampling of the artist's work. --Katherine Rook Lieber Katherine Rook Lieber has edited ArtScope.net's Visual and Performing Arts reviews since 1998. Ms. Lieber is Editor and Associate Producer for ArtScope.net. Editorial Note: Vasily Shulzhenko was earlier reviewed in ArtScope.net in July 1999 (http://www.artscope.net/VAREVIEWS/shulzhenko0799.shtml). |
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