Telegram chat on Evgeny Muzalevsky’s new exhibition at the Alina Pinsky Gallery (Moscow)

14 May 2023

Participants: Evgeny Muzalevsky (visiting his grandmother in the Samara region), Sergey Bratkov (Jüterbog, Germany), Leonid Tskhe (Jüterbog), Andrey Shabanov (Berlin)





S. B.: Zhenya, are you in a Gestapo basement somewhere? Why’s the light so dim? They already shaved you bald… (They laugh.)

E. M.: You must understand, Sergey, it’s my grandmother, if you don’t do what she says you’re in trouble. I had to go and get shaved. But I can hear you okay.

S. B.: Well, of course, we’re in Germany, we’ve got the Internet and everything here. Zhenya invited us to talk about his work. Let’s start like this. Here’s Lyonya sitting next to me, and in his work there’s a central character.

A. S.: Yes, it’s him.

S. B.: Yes, of course, it’s him. Or his lovely daughter, for example. Does Zhenya have a main character? You will agree that he does — it’s Zhenya himself. But I think it’s Zhenya in disguise. If Lyonya is recognizable because he keeps the academic traditions, then this cunning bald snake hides behind a fictional character who… in general, he’s a tadpole. (They laugh.) A well-defined head with a tail attached somewhere. Bread is the staff of life, but this is just a head. Perhaps it’s a good thing Zhenya’s not immediately recognizable, it becomes an adventure, the adventures of a tadpole… Or am I saying the wrong thing? What is Zhenya’s most recognizable quality?

L. T.: His vivid pictorial language. I think he’ll always have an individual signature style.

S. B.: We can talk about the qualities later. Let’s get back to the hero for now.

E. M.: OK, I want to join the discussion too. For me, this has always been an interesting question: what do I do? True enough, if we take Sergey’s generation or even older, Baselitz, for example, then the work of many artists from this generation is based on heroes, characters. I made an outright decision that I don’t want this myself, it doesn’t interest me to work like this, looking for a specific hero, a character. For me, as Lyonya correctly stated, it’s important to develop your own language. And as for the recognizable tadpole, that’s turning to a self-portrait, which I decompose in one way or another. In my works I try and relate to what’s happening to me, and to imagery as such. I’m interested in images and their various transformations. And these images can be extracted with different tools.

A. S.: Sergey, did you fall asleep there? (They laugh.)

S. B.: No, we didn’t fall asleep. Well, of course, Zhenya, we’re not talking about some kind of social
hero, but about a human hero. Anyway, relatively speaking, through this head – with a tail
or legs – your whole story is expressed: your relationship to your grandmother, to your mother. You’re painting your own story anyway.

E. M.: Yes, but it’s not narrowed down to my personal background…

S. B.: That’s understood, it’s broader than that. After all, you think of yourself, say, as a king, maybe with a crown. You can think of yourself as someone else. But you yourself stand at the centre of your
creativity. This is very egocentric work. Just admit it, please, don’t dodge the question. (They laugh.)

A. S.: It’s is a fairly common thing…

S. B.: Yes, absolutely. We’re not passing sentence, it’s a talk between friends. (They laugh.)

E. M.: Clearly every artist tries to portray himself in one way or another and looks for a particular way to do it. But my art isn’t only about me trying on different guises. For me it’s something more.

S. B.: We know that, Zhenya. If you only tried them on, it would be a carnival. Having agreed on the central character, let’s now talk about space in your works. By itself, a white canvas, especially on a stretcher, is already a space. Abstract artists create their own spaces with the help of brushstrokes and colours. Artists associated with a hero, a story, have a space in which this hero exists. As Lyonya has, for example. The space in his works is often a room, or it’s limited by a bush, an architectural element. What kind of space do you put yourself in? Which space is most fitting for your hero, for you?

E. M.: Usually this is space in the broadest sense: the space of caves, various miniatures, models of universes, cemetery monuments or buildings. Recently it’s been cells, prisons, dungeons.

S. B.: Zhenya, here it’s worth making a distinction between space and environment. Graves are an environment. But closer to painting, the cell is already a more structural thing that is resolved pictorially. How is your space built? What graphic or plastic-figurative structure does your hero live in?

E. M.: In the early paintings, for example, the figures are often placed in recognizable poses: they’re either standing or sitting. Everything else is very mobile, constantly changing.

S. B.: That is, globally you’re not aiming at claustrophobia, like Bacon, at a closed space.

E. M.: Yes, and my changing perception of space is influenced by new technical means, canvases, the medium, how and with what I paint a picture, or my latest hobbies: old engravings, printing techniques, reproductions.

S. B.: Another question: how did 24 February 2022 affect your space, and you? Your recent work with cells, for example, was done after this date...

E. M.: When all this happened, I couldn’t focus. At the time I had protracted depression, and in connection with these events I felt completely swallowed up in a claustrophobic nightmare. I was so freaked out, I was too scared to even call someone. I was living then in a small room in a hostel. I couldn’t sleep for a month or so. To distract myself, I read all the time. It was difficult for me to reflect on the present, so I began digging into the past, the 1920s to 1940s. I read a lot about the OBERIU group and what they themselves wrote. Thinking about today, I imagined what a prison is. For me this is the same problematic concept as the archive. Thinking about prison, I started constructing an archive. Looking at the architecture, for example, of Kresty Prison, at photographs of cultural figures of that time, reading their biographies and the poetry itself, I tried to pack it all into some kind of gallery, into a rigidly structured space reminiscent of confinement and an archive.

A. S.: You’re talking about ‘Fools’ now? In my opinion that’s the best work, the one most in tune with the times. I hope they show it in the exhibition.

E. M.: Yes, we agreed to include it.

S. B.: A question about your graphic work. What does it mean for you? Sometimes graphics are a distraction: you scribble something, thinking of a big form. Or it’s distraction as a way to collect your thoughts. Graphics can be a balancing act for filling up the sheet. I’m asking because you’re more of a painter, after all. Have you ever tried to create a graphic work from a completed painting?

E. M.: For me graphics are self-sufficient, original. On the one hand. I never use them as a preparatory drawing. On the other hand, I keep diaries, I’m constantly drawing something in them, expressing my thoughts graphically, adding images. And in general graphics allow me to hide. It’s very hard for me if
I forget to bring my diary, for example. Graphics were often used by outsider artists who never ventured into the field of large paintings, they constantly drew little sketches on linoleum or scraps of paper. In a similar way diary graphics help me live. In my recent works with watercolours, where I began completely filling in and working out the background, for me graphics turned out to be like the alchemical process of creation and contemplation of treasure. When I looked at these sheets in my little room, they somehow stabilized, radiating a certain...

L. T.: …an inner glow, like onyx. You filled everything with watercolours, transparent layers on fairly large sheets. Before that you structured them more analytically, geometrically. You talk about alchemy in watercolours... Salt and sugar, for example, give specific, peculiar effects.

E. M.: Yes, I started doing that after moving to Germany. Finally, the big things I created on three-metre sheets found in the garbage were also a way to emerge into painting and space.

A. S.: And what is Zhenya’s work based on? I think it’s graphics. I think all the most successful, convincing things in Zhenya’s paintings at the moment are due to his background in graphics.

S. B.: It’s hard to say. I think it’s the painting. Zhenya’s paintings are flat, but yes, the space is usually resolved by graphical means. What do you think, Lyonya?

L. T.: Zhenya is aiming at painting. Pictorial space is much more complex to overcome. The graphic space is conditional, there’s a rather limited number of tools. Zhenya wants to master the pictorial space in which his principles act as the pictorial means.

S. B.: Well, I think it’s better he doesn’t go there.

L. T.: Why?

S. B.: He’ll cease to be Zhenya. What’s good about him is that he has audacity, which helps him out. If Zhenya ventures too deep, in my opinion, he’ll lose his audacity. When you get into the depths, it’s no longer quick painting, there are many layers. You do quick painting, Lyonya. And Zhenya does ultra-quick painting, which gives this feeling of audacity. It’s in his hero, in his stories. But that’s my perception of Zhenya’s creativity: bold and fast, with quite precise colour. But if Lyonya is pensive, then Zhenya is temperamental, changeable and spontaneous. In general, it’s important that Zhenya’s image and temperament suit what he does.

L. T.: Yes, audacity is a flourish of some kind of momentary experience that can only be captured on a flat surface, on one occasion. Depth gives a certain sense of time.

A. S.: What other direction could Zhenya take? Sculpture?

S. B.: Yes, you shouldn’t limit yourself to one and a half mediums: graphics and painting. Zhenya can do sculpture, he could make a video. In his diploma work such a daring Calder appeared. I keep saying to you, Zhenya: “Where’s the sculpture, where’s the sculpture?” And he tells me: “German, German.” (They laugh.)

A. S.: Zhenya had an exhibition in the same gallery not long ago, about a year and a half ago. In my opinion they achieved a good critical mass of new and interesting ‘German’ works. Is there really the need to rush into a new exhibition?

S. B.: There’s the traditional approach where an artist produces a series of works, with an exhibition at the end of it. But sometimes you can force an exhibition. In the sense that showing these works is subject to time. Other people are thinking the same as you in parallel, they might make a move before you do. This is professional forcing, but also human. Because the relevance of what you’re doing is shaky.

A. S.: Yes, it would be right to show the work ‘Murderers – Fools’ right now. Zhenya, say a few words about the show. Have they devised a concept for the exposition yet? What will you insist on?

E. M.: I think it’ll be like a dance of coloured works around a central black and white composition.

S. B.: I want to ask something else. What’s your attitude to the painting as an object?

E. M.: For example, I don’t usually paint pictures on stretchers. This frees me from deliberate packaging, which precisely gives the feeling of a thing, an object…

S. B.: Lately you’ve been paying more attention to the canvas and paint. Why?

E. M.: The paints I buy in Germany are different from the paints I could get in Russia. German paints remind me of women’s lipstick; when you start dissolving them in turpentine they spread on the surfaces like lipstick…

S. B.: You see, here, on the one hand we have the attractiveness of lipstick, and on the other our innate territorial poverty, right? Anyway, the picture itself, its very form, speaks of beauty. But the aspect of something disgusting, which is present in art, is sometimes expressed in bad paint, in greasy spots, things like that. In this balance between national affiliation, there’s no escaping it, lies the quality, the trash and beauty of the form of the picture – there’s a certain significance here. You see, this is the nerve of modernity, which contains a lot of trash. We touched on the topic of paintings as things, when there is some ready-made thing, finished and stretched, which the layman wants to possess. If we are artists focused on our great future, on the museum, we must not succumb to this widespread feeling of possessing the materiality of the painting. There must be some kind of wound in the picture. Today, because of all this mass production, with wars all around, scars become a sign of life lived, a sign of the times.

Text transcription and editing: Andrey Shabanov