Art and fact: at the Francisco Infante exhibition, art and nature are one and the same

More than 400 works, many of which are photographs and photo collages (unusual, though), occupied the largest exhibition space of the Tretyakov Gallery, turning it into a total installation: a sixty-year reflection on the mysteries of nature, the connection between the natural and the man-made. This is how one can briefly describe Francisco Infante's large-scale retrospective - the first exhibition project of the Tretyakov Gallery in the new year. And it is symbolic that it is dedicated to the work of the living classic. "Izvestia" evaluated the exposition among the first.

Artifact instead of words

The hall on the third floor of the New Tretyakovka is traditionally used for the largest and most significant projects. It was there that blockbuster retrospectives of Serov, Aivazovsky, Vereshchagin, Repin, and so on were held. It is a huge space, convenient in that with the help of false walls it can be structured in a variety of ways, oriented towards the curator's ideas and the peculiarities of the art itself. But when you enter the Infante exhibition, you are shocked, because at first you can't see the building at all.

Everything in sight is occupied by square prints of "artifacts" (Infante's own genre), "crucified" on metal strings and seemingly floating in the air. The viewer can move freely between the series of works and does not even have to look at their titles: laconic labels are placed on the laths to which the strings are attached - on the side, near the floor. There are no additional descriptions. And what for, if Infante's work disposes to intuitive, pure perception?

"In my opinion, the main thing in art is to create a metaphor. It is more capacious than any verbal descriptions," said Francisco Infante in an interview with Izvestia. With his new exhibition he vividly illustrates this thesis.

The artist came to the idea of "artifact" more than half a century ago. He supplemented the natural environment with man-made objects - geometric figures made from improvised materials, stretched fishing lines, strips of foil, and thus sought to reveal the hidden logic of the landscape, to show how the physical and metaphysical meet. The resulting installation was recorded on a photo - necessarily in square format. And it was the photo that was considered an "artifact".

In the New Tretyakovka, the "artifacts" of different years seem to be deliberately mixed up. "Winter Squares" from 1977 (massive mirrored structures drowned in snow and seeming like something alien) neighbor the cycle "On the River - Memory of Water" (2008): where Infante admires the distorted reflections of colored lines in water ripples; from the famous "Suprematist Games" (1968), which transport Malevich's figures from cosmic nothingness to the real Moscow suburbs, we come to the series "In the Heavens - Clouds" (2007-2008), where multicolored disturbances appear on the landscape background.

The energy of perfection

Here, by the way, it is appropriate to recall the meaning of the word "artifact", which has spread in the computer-digital world: a certain flaw, distortion of a picture or video, for example, "staircase" on oblique lines from excessive file compression. Some of Infante's works - accidentally or intentionally - echo this notion and make us think: maybe the inclusions in natural landscapes are failures in the matrix (remember the movie of the same name?), quirks of neural networks?

Interpretations, however, can be any. One thing is certain: Infante's works, whether they are the latest "artifacts" or early abstractions, are about harmony. All his life he creates an ideal world in which the man-made organically combines with the natural, and speculative turns out to be flawless, mathematically verified.

One can see this perfectly in the works of the early 1960s. At that time Infante had not yet abandoned the brush and pencil in favor of the camera, but his canvases and watercolors embodied the same beauty of the universe, just manifested in a different way. In the cycle "Interpenetration - Romantic Image" shades of red, yellow and brown form perfect circles. And in the cycle "Spirals" dark background strictly vertically cut through the twisting lines. The painter achieved the effect of luminescence: it seems that these are rays or streams of energy.

Here again we can recall the first Russian avant-garde: if "Suprematist Games" referred to the author of "Black Square", "Spirals" is consonant with Olga Rozanova's "Green Stripe". However, Infante's ideology itself is fundamentally different. Malevich and his comrades exploded the world of art, "defeated the Sun", broke free from the shackles of earthly gravity. Infante does not seek to revolutionize or overthrow anything. His world is perfect as it is. And what's around - it doesn't matter.

The past and the eternal

It is difficult to imagine an artist more apolitical and independent of external circumstances. In this regard, one artifact (no longer in the sense of genre or distortion, but in the sense of an outlandish shard - a witness to other times), exhibited on the balcony of the hall, along with working sketches, letters and other items from the creative backstage, is curious. "Project of kinetic illumination of ancient architectural structures of the Red Square of the Moscow Kremlin" (1968) - the score of the light show, which Infante invented, but was never able to realize. It all began with an order from Mosproekt to design a show for the 60th anniversary of Soviet power. Infante creates a layout, a detailed scheme, but the management does not support his ideas. That's not surprising. The most ideologized place in the country, 25-year-old Francisco wanted to show as a set of pure architectural forms, a stage for an abstract visual apotheosis. No chanting of October, not even a climax in red colors.

The only thing that has survived to this day is the scheme, executed in tempera, pencil and ink on lined-up sheets of paper. But it seems to be a self-contained work: it is simultaneously a cardiogram, a graph of sound waves and color flows. Is the work outdated? Not at all. It survived the Soviet regime that rejected it by entering the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery.

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Infante was born in the family of an emigrant from Spain, a Republican who fled to the USSR from the horrors of Franco's civil war. The future classicist lost his father at an early age, experienced the hungry years after the Great Patriotic War, entered the art scene at the end of the Khrushchev thaw, but made his main discoveries during the suffocating Brezhnev stagnation, when there seemed to be no chance to be truly realized, working outside the official system. Then came perestroika, and yesterday's outsiders suddenly became fashionable and in demand. But although times, ideologies and living conditions were changing, Infante's art was not affected. His evolution followed some kind of its own, internal trajectory.

Today, Infante's approach looks like not just an artistic and professional strategy, but a universal recipe. And the Tretyakov Gallery's decision to give its main exhibition hall to him and, in principle, to pay such attention to a living author is practically a manifesto. A few years ago, before all the cataclysms of the 2020s, a retrospective of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov was opened in the same space and no less pompously. However, Kabakov's art grew out of Soviet communal rooms, squalid everyday life, queues for sausage, and meaningless announcements on the wall of the housing and utilities department, and on the whole the entire project was a reflection on the past. Infante, on the other hand (incidentally, also together with his faithful collaborator Nonna Goryunova), always reflects on the eternal. It seems remarkably relevant these days.