Dots, dots, commas: Soviet abstractionism sends signals

What do the works of the Soviet abstract artist from the thaw period, signals from space, and experimental foreign animation from the first half of the 20th century have in common? The answers to these questions are provided by the exhibition "Forward to Zlotnikov", which opened at Ground Solyanka in collaboration with the pop/off/art gallery. Yuri Zlotnikov's work is shown here in an unexpected context, but the participation of the master's heirs in the project guarantees a careful attitude to the meanings laid down by the author. Izvestia was among the first to rate the exhibition.

From space to Paradise

Interest in the work of Soviet nonconformist artists has long outgrown the current fashion and has become a stable phenomenon, giving rise to more and more new exhibition projects. So the art of Yuri Zlotnikov can not be called deprived of attention. It is enough to recall last year's retrospective at the Tretyakov Gallery (read the Izvestia article). That exhibition, however, was built around Zlotnikov's most famous series, The Signal System, which was complemented by Protosystems, a kind of approach to this metacycle. Now, viewers are invited to evaluate the work of the Soviet abstract painter more broadly and, in addition, with interesting parallels.

Yuri Zlotnikov was one of the first to engage in pure abstraction in the USSR in the second half of the century. Of course, his art is the flesh of the flesh of the thaw era, when, on the one hand, it became possible to do things that could not have been done before, and on the other, everyone was incredibly inspired by cosmic achievements. Actually, the "Signal System", dating from 1957-1962, became the embodiment of this desire for the new both in form and in content. By placing multicolored dots, circles and lines on the white space of the sheet, Zlotnikov seemed to be trying to capture and decrypt (or maybe, on the contrary, encrypt?) the messages of distant civilizations, their otherworldly impulses.

But the search in this direction could not go on indefinitely. And it's not at all about the next "freezes", which began just in 1962 after Nikita Khrushchev destroyed the exhibition of abstract artists in the Manege, but about the inner feeling of exhaustion of the topic. However, Zlotnikov did not turn to figurative art, as, for example, Anatoly Zverev, who also experimented with pointlessness in the late 1950s, and then became one of the best Soviet portraitists. No, the author of "Signals" continued to explore the hidden logic and the emerging relationship of colors and strokes. But I've taken a step towards being more improvisational and emotional.

This is how, for example, the "Biblical Cycle" appeared, where in one of the works an apple floats among various dashes and myriad dots (stars? the hidden structure of God's world?), and in a single wavy line winding through a straight vertical, one can see a hint of a serpent. This monochrome work in the "Ground Solyanka" is exhibited together with two colored sheets, the space of which is divided into nine segments — a hint at the illustrated lives of saints or stamps on icons. Although even if you really want to, you can't see any specific plots in the images themselves. Rather, the streams of uneven shapes and segments convey the generalized drama of the events of the Holy Scriptures.

Cartoons about abstraction

These items are not exhibited as often as "Alarm Systems", but the main surprise is not even Zlotnikov's specific works, but their dialogue with early Western European animation. In this case, the "Biblical Cycle" is compared with Ein formspiel (1927) by Oskar Fischinger. Half a century before the advent of computer graphics and video art, he experimented with non-objective graphic figures that come to life on the screen, patterns whose looping movement fascinates and at the same time poses the viewer with the question: what is the internal logic of these images? It seems to be there, but it is beyond comprehension. What's wrong with Zlotnik's experiments?

The exhibition occupied two floors of the Solyanka building, and its specific architecture — a multitude of small rooms that you look into alternately, as if looking for an artifact in a computer game — turned out to be very organic to Zlotnikov's mysterious art (the curator of the project was artist and composer Nikita Spiridonov, and the consultants were the grandchildren of the master Alexander Zlotnikov and Andrei Tyulenev). So, in each nook we see a new block of work — and a new on-screen "companion". In addition to the aforementioned Fishinger, these are Harry Smith, Mary Ellen Bute, Viking Egglening. They are hardly familiar to the general public, and Zlotnikov almost certainly did not know them. It is all the more interesting that Western film experimenters and a Soviet painter came to the same ideas in different types of art and from different sides.

Or here's another epiphany from our compatriot: a leaf almost completely drenched in red — pulsating, vibrating, spreading. Mark Rothko? Yves Klein, who did something similar, only in blue? Yes and no. Even here Zlotnikov is individual and recognizable. By the way, this work is cleverly placed at the end of a long corridor. As a result, it attracts attention from afar, literally magnetizes the viewer with its mystical sound.

Signals for the future

However, the strongest impression awaits visitors not on the lower level, where mainly graphic works are placed, but on the second floor. There, the walls are occupied by large late Zlotnikov canvases. And it turns out that this seemingly chamber artist, who preferred minimalistic, mathematically dry use of white sheets, felt no less organically when working with oil, and could fill a three-dimensional space with incredible energy flows that were no longer static, like "Signals", but directed in different directions. Although just as mysterious.

Creative dialogues have also taken place here, but not with Western classics, but with our contemporaries. And it turns out that Zlotnikov's art is not really a thing in itself, but a life—giving environment in which a variety of phenomena can grow, be it the graphic scores for the synthesizer of Olesya Rostovskaya or the pseudo-childish drawings on the walls of Sasha Moroz (the cycle "Predawn Twilight" is directly inspired by Zlotnikov's works and was created on the eve of the exhibition).

Probably, this retrospective cannot be considered exhaustive, although it is not inferior in scale, and perhaps even surpasses the Tretyakov Gallery. At the same time, this is further proof that the Soviet legacy, in particular Zlotnikov, is still being studied and studied, deciphering his signals sent into the future.