Igor Skaletsky. The Tricksters’ Circus
Sergey Khachaturov is an art critic, theorist, curator, and art historian. He holds a PhD in Art Studies and is an associate professor at the Department of Russian Art History, Faculty of History, Moscow State University. He also teaches at the Alexander Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia in Moscow.
He uses this quality in his relatively recent works, which are produced in traditional techniques (oil on canvas) and represent a museum of modernism rotated in the centrifuge. The collage method of embedding, of fragments in different, often mutually exclusive styles that cut into one other, is, of course, associated with eminent artists of the Leipzig school, primarily with Neo Rauch. Like Rauch, Skaletsky received a classical academic education and can therefore carry out interventions, trickster forays into the picture, while fully armed with a superb sense of form. Thanks to his collage of romanticism and the Biedermeier style with abstraction and surrealism, Neo Rauch creates a situation of pictorial evidence in which there is multiple proof of the dramatic, tragic event that occurred, yet no key to deciphering it. This method brings Rauch's painting closer to the youngest aggregative art of zoomer artists. Among the notable Russian zoomers are Pavel Polshchikov, Slava Nesterov and Anna Tagantseva. They post evidence, cryptograms. They collect collages, evidence of various craft practices, and install a mysterious event, a situation in which the viewer himself must become Sherlock Holmes, the detective- investigator.
Igor Skaletsky seems to be ridiculing the brutal seriousness of the modernist tradition (from symbolism to Art Nouveau and the avant-garde) and the abstruse art of intermedial aggregators, even Neo Rauch himself. His epic becomes an OBERIU verse of the absurd, and the detective story turns to humour. Coloristic ingenuity is combined with a parody of the canon of symbolist representation. Memes of pop art and web punk design mimic one another. The image itself often becomes the clown on a circus stage of multi-coloured lights. That's why my favourite Skaletsky image is that of a plasma-enhanced buffoon-like figure stepping forth in sparkling floppy trousers.