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Erik Bulatov 05.09.1933
For Bulatov and Vassiliev a picture is not simply an actual genre, but a family home, which each of them has been building for more than half a century. Each builds his own home, but simultaneously it seems like they are building one in the same. They will meet in the middle: one essentially from the ground up, while the other more down from the sky. The result: THE PICTURE IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE PICTURE. One cannot say it better than Bulatov. Or what: Don’t they wear death, anymore? Where… Death has already done enough to rake away the carrion…
The Classic theme. 1. Without superfluous ideological music, just simply: cut out your art. Now the artist is a nobody, and the curator will be appointed for no purpose, simply because it is convenient for us; and we are the majority. Is it the artist who makes art? Let it be so, if he has nothing better to do. Death of art … Well, “death”… is a normal cancellation. Cultural. Organized.
2. “Epoch of objection”? Dissidence through art?… Do we need objections? If so, we shall order them self-service.
3. Emotions, human feelings? Now principally all this has been set aside. Moods and state of mind are a shame nowadays.
In other words, there is no joking with some trends in art, they are a struggle against art as a whole. And how impressive science is by easily achieving the realms of fancy from where everything is united: good/bad; accomplished/not accomplished; exists/does not exist … It is called postmodernism, it is called relativism… From the heights the images disappear: where there is relativism there is nothing for art to do. True ideology of art’s death is postmodernism as total relativism; it is practically, the negation of a possibility of truly doing something well. In essence, this is the negation of real fact in art.
In reply to such a scale, a new scale is required; anything relevant is too hard for such jaws.
And it is neither possible to find, nor invent anybody more relevant than Erik Bulatov. Erik goes straightforward: he is used to it. With a rare gift of organic chrestomathy and artistic carriage: he is right in the center. His organic blends with his construction, the picture becomes irrefutably à la Leonardo and yields to death in the last instance; for deathexperts it is real death.
And they act by their resources. How else to explain the fact that Bulatov’s turn to have an exhibition will take place at the end of 2006? His colleagues have held him practically adrift for 20 years starting in 1985, and his elder comrades, socialist realists, harassed him for the same number of years, plus another 7 or 8.
Vassiliev is a year or two older; he was given the opportunity to seriously exhibit at the end of 2004-beginning of 2005. He does not “build”, but rather “cultivates” a picture with care, attentively, from a sketch on location, sometimes almost from a dot, but a living dot without losing, above all, the keenness of feeling of that, which, as both Bulatov and Vassiliev would say, “has been caught”. How it is here that the edge of heaven was glanced at … Indeed.
Vsevolod Nekrasov
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