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THE PAINTER AND HIS WORLD
Tamara Yefetova
Art critic
He paints as he lives and he lives as he paints. It is not a simple declaration. It is the only possible way
for a painter to live. His canvases are a new reality where his existence is as natural as in real, not painted
life.
Sincerity and maximum self-expression is what you feel in his works, what draws you in them. Everything created
by Bobrusov makes you gaze at his pictures to be able to immerse into his world. These might be his dreams about
something that never came true, something he failed to realize in himself or in the people around him. These
might be his dreams about harmony with himself and with the world, the harmony which can not be discovered or
captured in real life. There is kindness and internal stability present in the painter’s world, and you want
to dissolve, hide in it and escape from the vain rush of everyday life.
Here everything is in its place and everything belongs to its place: the child and the dog, the tree and the old man,
the grass and the mysteriously giant tortoise. This world is governed by love and harmony. It is simple and easy to
breathe here, nothing puts pressure on you (neither ideology, nor artistic means of expression), nothing frightens
you, even the rats. You do not feel any pretence in these works, and even the painting “Dance with the witch” is
as natural as all the others.
NOVELS OF HIMSELF
Ksenia Bezmenova
PhD in Visual Arts
The world of bright fairy fantasies attracts spectators attention in Alexei Bobrusov’s paintings. In the base
of every work of the painter there is a real motive - a landscape, an animal, or a human. But in the canvases
the real turns into the unreal, and the images acquire the character of a theatrical performance. Rats
grow up to a huge size, mice begin to fly, strange people live against the background of exotic
landscapes. The painter consciously escapes everyday life.
His pictures are biographical. First, their plot is a phenomenon that greatly impressed the painter,
secondly, he himself and his family often take part in the events. Concrete references are characteristic of
most Bobrusov’s works. The subject of these pictures always creates a story, a narration with the lyric
basis dominating. All this makes it possible to call them pictorial novels.
Bobrusov himself is one of the characters in his pictures (he can be smaller than the other images). In
these pictures the heroes are portrayed in the foreground, against the background of the sky, the
composition always including the low horizon. But unlike the other characters who are portrayed with a
huge head on a thin neck with a small body, the painter is represented in a natural way and plays the role
of a tuning fork. His figure plays the key role resulting in a specific situation or an intrigue. The main
character who is always huge, does not appear to be frightening, bur on the contrary he turns out to be
charming, curious and kindly.
The feeling of a game goes through all the creative activity of the artist. People and animals always play
somebody or something. Melancholy, sadness or joy are not the features they possess, they exist without
expressing any definite emotions. There is an element of bewitchedness, of static in his pictures.
In Alexei Bobrusov s painting colour does not play an important role, it s graphics that dominates. They
often speak of a pictorial tendency in graphics, here you face an opposite phenomenon - graphic devices
penetrate into the painting: compositions are built like friezes, the action develops in parallel to the plane
( The Demonic Family 1991, The Male Games 1993, The Exile 1995.) In graphics several sheets can
be devoted to the same subject, it makes a series. A. Bobrusov develops the same subject in several pictures.
Having graduated from the Polygraphic Institute in 1980s, he worked with etching and autolithograph,
which attract his attention up to now. In the etchings of 1990s he turns to the mobile model, using
metal fragments of different shapes. He modifies them when printing (in composition and in colour, and
it helps him make reprints of polyfaceted character.
However, the artist s main interest lies not in graphics but in painting. Creating a picture, the painter
keeps searching for new expressive means: he can build a rectangle over the picture, or paint a frame as
if accomplishing the main intention. Using his intuition, aiming at the creation of polysemantics and
tense atmosphere in his works, trying to be more expressive, he uses pieces of cloth and of metal and
wood. A great interest in colour disseminations displays the direction of his creative research.
LETTERS FROM JOURNEYS
About Myself the Beloved: Appropriation of the Appropriated
The two series of Alexei Bobrusov s paintings and graphic works brought together in the present album
in one way or another belong to the venerable visionary tradition in art. This presupposes a spuriously
generous portion of the author s subconscious (spurious because the subconscious is usually abbreviated
and selected by the professional conscious). Under the circumstances it is pertinent to examine the
relationship between fiction and reality, their mutual contamination and the actual prototypes of
fantasies in art.
In Bobrusov s case the artist is literary present in his works: his colourful figure, accompanied by those of
his wife, friends and acquaintances (Bobrusov swears he gave the outlines of actual people when painting
his personages), appears in nearly every work. If it is dreams that Bobrusov has, he sees himself as if it
were somebody else, which is a rare thing. Autobiographical motifs have been cloaked to the utmost
extent in his series of paintings entitled Strangers (1997-1998). The author has been transformed into a
tortuously majestic disabled pharaoh (as Bobrusov calls his hybrid of an ancient Assyrian and a
commuting cripple) and his companions often wear, for the sake of psychidelic conspiracy, masks of
some incongruous national provenance (reminiscent of Egypt or Venice), with his nine-part comic strips
set against the fairly conventional Nile valley, the mockingly disfigured Erechteion or what appears to be
St. Mark s Square. This overabundance of cultural iconographic, attributive, architectural and
geographical fetishes makes these visions look like an aftermath of an intellectual intoxication of
some artist (art critic or traveller). Bobrusov, as it were, takes his viewer along on a travesty journey
through mankind s cultural memory, the cultural subconscious engorged with lust simultaneously for the
Acropolis and the pyramide of Cheops. The plots of individual episodes of Bobrusov s Strangers
( processions, swims, feasts and comebacks, etc.), their makeup and geography are
oversaturated with the history of art. That is, apparently, why Bobrusov delicately and at the same time
facetiously sets himself, his family and friends against those textbook landscapes, thus reappropriating
the cliched sanctuaries.
The author s healthy egocentrism is even more pronounced in a later and slightly unusual series of
graphic sheets entitled Letters to My Father (1998-1999), in which Bobrusov comes across as a fine
calligrapher and man of letters, in addition to being an excellent master of colorful drawings. His
traditional scenes of himself shown in household Surrealist surroundings on this occasion look lighter
not only technically and stylistically (after all, a tempera piece is different from something done in oil),
but also semantically, that is, the aforementioned cultural oversaturation is barely there. The conscious
Ich is taking (or, pehaps, just pretending to take) the minutes of Alexei Bobrusov s life, using the
subconscious matrix Es (naturally, simulated in a work of art) and appealing to the superconscious
Uber-Ich embodied in the Father figure not so much symbolic as real and very much his own. This series,
obviously, continues to play with cultural cliches and fetishes this time borrowed relatively recently rather
than from antiquity. Indeed Bobrusov builds an ideal Freudian model in his graphic sheets, but to escape
the pestering attention of psychoanalysts, resorts to salvaging imagery: the handwriting is different in
every letter, which seems to hint at either a severe form of schisophrenia in the main character or his
absence and hence fictitious nature. (Even though the artist claims that every letter is genuine and was
really addressed to his father). The familiar man from phantasmagoric illustrations then appears as an
artefact personage a la Ilya Kabakov s creatures rather than Bobrusov s alter ego.
Though, what I have just said is a slight exaggeration. Bobrusov s aesthetics are devoid of tragic cynicism
characteristic of the Chief Russian Artist and are conservatively pathetic. Bobrusov makes use of
Conceptualist techniques, while remaining true to his own self. His Letters to My Father are both an
advanced project and an intimate diary, a human document, which has long been transformed into a
theme, technique and material of mimetic contemporary art, is thus restored its original primacy. In a
word, we have here again the familiar appropriation of the appropriated.
The contrived operation of recycling, however, leaves no room for the subconscious and hence the
inherent visionary nature of Bobrusov s art, which brings us back to where we started, speaking of his
spurious generosity.
Fedor Romer
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