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Valery Valran
«St. Petersburg. Trees»
Àlexander Sekatsky
THE MOST IMPORTANT TASK OF AN ARTIST
The conception of the Valery Valran exhibition seems somewhat mysterious, as
does his whole creative ethos. He is an artist dedicated to an absolute
pictorial approach, rejecting any coquettish game of hints: the game in which an
artist makes believe that he or she does not know what his or her works are
about, and the audience is grateful for the "mystery". Such a playful mystery is,
in fact, an article in the pure art, a way of coordination of
counter-expectations.
However, the false significance differs from a direct pictorial approach in only
one way: it masks the lie much more skillfully, revealing no truth, at that.
Still, it is not easy to refrain from participation in these games: the
temptation of the shortest way to success and fame is too great. One has to be
very steadfast and loyal to oneself, if you please - the exact qualities that
the artist Valran invariably demonstrates. He has much to say and he insists on
his right to be understood as an artist - in the primordial sense of the word -
and not as a conceptualist adjoining a detached idea to a voluntary pictorial
sequence.
What exactly does the exaggerated emptiness of the City, the theme (we will call
it that) that has captivated this artist for so many years, mean? What, in
principle, does the unprecedented autonomy of things that has been so selflessly
declared and studied by this master mean? There is much vagueness for me here
but, in the end, I see a metaphysic effort to create a perfect portrait of the
non-existent. Just as views from above or from the side exist, evidently, a view
through absence of presence must exist when precisely traced embrasures of
emptiness are called forth to recreate the presence that had entered them. This
is the most difficult perspective capture, but also a challenge worthy of a real
artist.
When, for instance, we say: "there is no inkpot on the table", we declare a kind
of non-existence. We immediately understand that one non-existence differs from
another non-existence: if we distinctly observe that an inkpot is indeed absent
on the table, because there remains an impression on the tablecloth and a drop
of ink as well (and, besides, we need the inkpot so much!), then we are dealing
with an image through absence, with the image that could be much more vivid than
any "positive" portrait… And, thus, the non-existence, the nothingness, is
capable of carrying a definiteness and insistency of the highest order – if the
point involves a non-existence of essence. In the same way, an absent friend
will become impressed in our soul with all the power of expectancy and anguish.
Thus Valran’s fraught-with-absence St. Petersburg appeals with its every
embrasure of emptiness, conveying those who filled up these embrasures rather
than itself, announcing our illusion of guaranteed presence. While we were sure
of the domestic nature of the landscape, of its being under the control of our
own glance. We close our eyes – and there is nothing. Quite a childish exercise.
The artist offers a reverse operation: we open our eyes – and we do not exist
any longer but only this: only St. Petersburg performing the mutual erasure of
flickering presences under the calm stare of eternity, whereas we stay in the
embrasures of absence. And how very convincingly the artist restores these
embrasures! It is worth viewing intensively, thinking intensely and
then,possibly Valran's metaphysics will open next steps, not yet subject to
discursive formulations, for us.
Àlexander Skidan
THE WITNESS OF INVISIBLE
St. Petersburg is traditionally associated with no end of
trouble, phantasmagoria, and ambivalence. This romantic tradition implies
discrepancy between the visible (beautiful) and its lining (monstrous), a tragic
dissension of the essence and phenomenon capable of leading to destruction of
the beautiful magnificent façade and to madness like in the "Brass Horseman" or
"Nevsky Prospect" predetermining the matrix of the "St. Petersburg text". In St.
Petersburg landscapes by Valran, there is nothing of the kind. They are
amazingly "empty", purified not only from "superfluous architectural details,
everyday life details, and from people" but also from the train of mythological,
literature, historical references and extraneous features. The artist performs
sort of reduction of phenomenological epoch addressing himself across the heads
of famous predecessors to the pre-Gogol, pre-Pushkin epoch: to the classical
utopia of the 18th century last time revived, as it seems, in the graphics by
Ostroumova-Lebedeva and the early prose by Konstantin Vaginov who wrote: "In St.
Petersburg, there is no and never has been any fogs, it is clear and simple, and
the sky over it is blue. Its pillars fly up in their odes dedicated to the
flocks of clouds" ("Bethlehem Star", 1922).
This classical utopia is graphic and not pictorial, and it is
traced back to a panorama optics impressed in prospects (planes) of St.
Petersburg in the 18th century (primarily by genial Mikhail Makhaev).
Particularly fascinating in these "engraved views" of St. Petersburg today is,
along with overwhelming ordering of the smallest details, "extra-disseverance"
of the point from which the draughtsman directs its glance coinciding, it seems,
with the all-seeing glance of the Divine Eye. (Makhaev went up bell towers or
specially erected dais and from there, using the pinhole camera, made his very
first drafts). The even Divine Light knowing no obstacles, leaving no dark spots
or pens sanctifies and deploys a city-utopia. The Light that seems to be eternal
because its source is eternal, carried beyond the plan-prospect frame, just like
Plato's blessing is carried beyond the limits of Being.
Such panoptic really reminds Plato's theory, i.e. epiphany in
Greek language (and imperialism) of the light, and it is not by chance that
Valran also chooses unusually high, "elevated" viewpoints for his "panoramas"
and in general describes his approach in terms of Plato's "idea" and Young's
"archetype". (Generally speaking, Valran is and artist of uncommonly
intellectual disposition, extremely conscientiously approaching his work. One
might think he deeply imbibed and very creatively reworked the experience of
conceptualism, having transferred the critics of figurative language from the
area of ideological cliché inside, into the plane of the picture itself as the "eidos".
The echo of this experience is noticeable also in the collective projects whose
organizer and curator he is). And here, possibly, we approach the main enigma of
his landscapes.
Like St. Petersburg in cultural conscience will be, because
of the cultural automatism, immediately associated with the "St. Petersburg
text", in the same way the "eidos" and the light will be associated with
rationality, clearness, logicality. However, these seemingly classically
"clear", saturated with the mind's light, "realistic" pictures exert a strange
alarming-hypnotic effect particularly well sensed when placed next to photos of
the same, often quite familiar "picture post-card" places: the effect of
unreality, unrecognisibility. It is related to three principal moments which I
have already mentioned in passing: absence of shadow, desertedness and
"suspension", inhuman measurability of the glance. Yet in the end of 1990s, I
wrote about this strangeness "pricking" me: "I couldn't recollect such a city.
In it, only impassably frozen and casting no shadow tress remained, the
riverbanks turning into nowhere, house facades painted in every smallest detail.
And the more convincing the pictorial - along with the topographic –
authenticity, the stronger the inculcated hidden effect of "unreality",
"other-worldliness" of this world deprived of shadows". Today, I would add
that, in this "other-worldliness", there is something dreamy, something of the
"metaphysical painting" by de Kiriko (although in de Kiriko's works, shadows –
even though "shifted" – are still present, as well as human figures), something
fascinating and, at the same time, frightening. As if a finely stylized curtain
raises all of a sudden and we would find ourselves in a deserted desolate city
that was just wiped out by a neutron tornado which has left behind just scenery
in the form of architectural monuments. And trees.
So, here is a double reduction or a double abstracting:
(from) St. Petersburg (pictorial) tradition, and the painting itself boiled down
to nearly pure "whitened" graphism. Owing to that, the city landscape is
presented as, say, a "skeleton" of the landscape, its X-ray imaging. The
technique implying that Valran who started time ago as an expressive
abstractionist, arrived at kind of "photographed" figurative abstractionism. In
other words, he positions himself not as an artist-abstractionist but rather as
an artist of the abstract. (And this is not a mere play of words).
This enables one to read at another angle the "cold"
dehumanized aura enveloping these canvases. At the very dawn of abstraction,
Apolliner wrote of the cubists: "An artist is primarily a person who aspires
beyond the limits of human" ("The artists of Cubism", 1913). A book by
Ortegi-Gassett "Dehumanisation of Art" (1925) is widely known. This book shows
the tendency in a wide socio-cultural context, against the background of radical
changes developing in Europe after the First World War, the tendency being often
understood in a very flat way and simply wrongly. As Giorgio Agamben explains,
"the charge of the modern art is directed not against a human being but against
his or her ideological surrogates: it is not antihuman but rather antihumanistic
" ("Stanzas. Word and phantasm in the culture of the West", 1977). "To aspire
beyond the limits of the human" means, therefore, a break from the humanistic
concept as an ideologically loaded construct. After Verdun and Soma, this became
quite clear: "Nothing reminds a human being less than a human being", if using
the words by Brummel who, it must be admitted, meant not the horrors of the war
but "simply" transformation of a human being into goods, into a thing. Hence the
monstrous decomposition of the human figure in Picasso's works; arabesques by
Matisse confusing a human shape and a carpet pattern; hieroglyphic pictograms by
Clee through which a "suffocated" human face shows through; a suffering
symbiosis of a human being and an animal in Filonov's works; black squares and
faceless peasants by Malevich (the list can easily be continued).
Valran, being an artist of a different epoch, acts more
finely, not that demonstratively. As we have seen, his "panoramas" address us to
harmonic light-bearing rationalistic utopia of the 18th century. But at the same
time, they reveal and repudiate its imperialistic, inhuman, panic optics at a
deeper level. And here, at the new turn, it is necessary to come back to the
"St. Petersburg text" with its sacramental "Empty be this place". But to come
back already in comprehensive introspection as, in fact, the artist does
propose.
Looking at the landscapes by Valran, one recollects, of
course, not the "St. Petersburg Novels" and neither 'The Brass Horseman", but
another verse by Pushkin or, to be more precise, his first quatrain grasping the
St. Petersburg's "eidos":
Splendid city, poor city,
Bondage spirit, well-shaped sight,
High-sky vault so pale and greenish,
Boredom, coldness and granite…
And also this desperate exclamation of Innokenty Annensky
that burst from him prior to any "seventeenth year", i.e. related to the first
two centuries of the history of this "magnificent" Imperial metropolis: And
the deserts of numb public squares, Where the people were punished at daybreak.
Indeed, how can one forget, looking together with the artist at the Mars
Field or Mikhailovsky Garden from the Engineer's Castle window, what, for
instance, happened in this Castle, who then studied there, and on what
parade-ground this "someone" was standing? After all, whether one can forget,
"reduce" one's memory to the fact that St. Petersburg had appeared primarily as
a political – Imperial – Project, or that Peter the First who had founded the
new metropolis of the State of Russia became the first sovereign who conferred
the rank of the Emperor to himself?
It becomes gradually more and more clear why the artist had
to juxtapose painting and photography. The first, superficial perusal of this
"conceptual" gesture will involve construction of obvious opposition: on one
hand, the "pure" architectural "archetype" of St. Petersburg, its eternal "eidos";
on the other hand, a temporal, "haphazard" envelope "fogging" this "eternal"
image. But it is far from that simple. Just like the pictorial "eidos" itself
is, in fact, being torn apart by the conflict between "culture" (architecture)
and "nature" (trees), the "male" and "female" elements (whence the sensation of
the "metaphysical alarm"), so the painting and photography would exchange their
respective roles at a certain moment. It is the painting that, in a paradoxical
way, assumes the protocol-documentary function: it – and not photography – is
really historical as it implicitly indicates the permanent violence lurking
under the "official" cover of the history.
Just not to be unsubstantiated, I will cite Walter Benyamin
mentioning deserted Paris streets in the photos by Atge in a quite remarkable
context: "In the face expression quickly grasped in early photos, the aura
reminds of itself for the last time. That is where their melancholic and
incomparable fascination is hidden. Whereas in the pictures where the man is
absent from the photo, the exposure function for the first time overcomes the
cult one. This process was caught by Atge, and that is what makes the
significance of this photographer quite unique. In his photos, this photographer
embodied the deserted Paris streets of the border between centuries. Quite
justly they say about this artist that he photographed them like loci delicti.
After all, locus delicti is also deserted. It will be photographed for the sake
of evidence of crime. In Atge's works, the pictures begin transforming into the
proofs submitted at the history process. This comprises their hidden political
significance". ("Works of art in the epoch of its technical reproducibility",
1936).
The photography is traditionally believed to be an "assassin"
of painting; at least – the painting in "realistic" understanding, as a
reflection of visible reality. In the case of Valran, painting gains revenge
opening up towards photography, imbibing the principle of witnessing the
invisible: and this is its real aesthetic – as well as political –
significance.
Valran
I "entered" Leningrad through black trunks of naked trees at the end of 1960s. I
painted my first landscape in 1978 and then, only after ten years did I approach
the themes of architecture (culture) and character (nature). By this time, I had
already purified the city of superfluous architectural details, of everyday life
details, and of people. The city as Plato's "idea" was acquiring features of
Jung's "archetype" through the mourning cobweb of the black branches. At the
same time, in this juxtaposition or joining, another latent opposition was
present: between the male, or rational origin (the architecture) and the female,
or irrational one (water, trees). In the context of the "St. Petersburg text",
the trees were the carriers of metaphysical alarm, the houses and riverbanks of
classical harmony. Anyway, that is what I wanted.
I constructed, rather than painted, all my landscapes. Usually I would make
drafts of the nature, preferring views from higher floors or roofs. Then, in my
studio, I would construct a perspective and overlay/add the drawing with a small
brush (squirrel # 1-3). I started painting the houses, then the riverbanks,
water, sky. And at the final stage, I would "impose" black trees, the paint
thick and encasing, so that no previously painted architectural element of the
landscape would appear through it.
My first landscapes were dense in colour. But, in time, I started adding more
and more whiting and, as I continued doing so, I would arrive at a white
landscape. But nothing of this kind happened as, in 2003, I became involved in
photography. I borrowed my first camera (Canon EOS 3000) from an artist, Sasha
Bazarin, to photograph the "Selected Places". I photographed "Roofs of St.
Petersburg" with a digital camera (Canon Power Shot S60). For the Project "St.
Petersburg. Trees", I purchased a medium-format camera (Mamiya 645) and made
slides. I scanned selected images with the maximum resolution and then muted the
intensity of the colours in Photoshop.
I encountered different problems in photography from in painting. In painting, I
choose a voluntary viewpoint in space that can be non-existent in reality, and
then, proceeding from this point, I construct the landscape. In photography, a
viewpoint exists immutably in real space, and the camera’s construction,
including lens specifications, predetermines the potential possibilities of the
image. In painting, the depicted material is determined by my will and
individual vision. I can add the non-existent or exclude the unnecessary, for
instance, chimneys on the houses, posts and wires, cars, dogs and people. In
photography, the image comprises only reality: what is present at the moment of
taking the picture. Moreover, a painter, while sitting at home in the studio,
can choose for his or her landscape any time of the year, any weather, any
illumination. A photographer must wait for the weather conditions necessary for
photography. In other words, a photograph reflects real vision, whereas painting
reflects inner vision.
Notwithstanding all this, photography possesses no less mysteries and mysticism
than painting. It is well known that a printed photograph does not essentially
differ from what the photographer saw through the viewfinder when taking it.
This relates both to the details that quite often remain unnoticed during
photographing and to the details found in the print. But another thing is
amazing: a printed photograph, as compared with what was observed through the
viewfinder, acquires a new metaphysical quality: completeness, stability, and
temporal determinacy. Maybe that is why a "good" photograph always emerges
unexpectedly, even for its creator. And why, in the same way, a picture that
seemed ideal as the shutter clicked, when printed turns out to be disappointing.
The formula: "we do not know what we are doing" is quite appropriate here. The
Muse, a divine intervention… W.Benjamin thought that the unconscious acted here
as a mediator. "The point is that the nature directed towards camera is not the
same as directed towards the eye; the primary difference is that place of space
mastered by humanity will be occupied by the space mastered by the unconscious".
The camera commits and fragments the reality, but whether the frame acquires the
status of a work of art is fully dependent on the photographer.
This Project is based on fifteen views of St. Petersburg, each of them executed
in two techniques: painting and photography. Where possible, I tried to choose
the most easily comparable viewpoints in order to demonstrate more completely
the commonness and difference in the languages of painting and photography.
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