Andrey Volkov

Echoing Paul Klee’s words, “the more horrible this world, the more abstract our art”, Russian nonfigurative artists are increasingly shifting away from a post-conceptual optic in their approach to painting as a medium. Until quite recently, choosing non-objective painting as an artistic strategy implied a playful mimicry of modernist abstraction and an ironic “dissection” of its well-worn devices, treated as already worked through within the critical reflection of art history. Yet the logic of that very history implies a change of direction. An increasingly complex present, whose supposedly “non-contradictory” interpretations have become impossible to trust, pushes artists to abandon intellectual postmodern strategies in favor of rediscovering a whole range of half-forgotten discourses. The growing popularity of metaphysics, esotericism, and formalism marks yet another transition from the rational to the sensuous-intuitive, as in the early twentieth century – an era whose interest in irrational origins, in fact, gave rise to abstract painting.

Against this backdrop, the artistic practice of Andrey Volkov, one of the most consistent non-objective artists on the Russian scene, takes on renewed relevance. From the outset, he has remained faithful to a set of core tenets, inherited in equal measure from American Abstract Expressionism and the Russian avant-garde. Foremost among them is a belief in the artist’s sensuous and emotional experience, as he lives through the present with dramatic intensity. This experience is inexpressible in words, yet in it lies the genuine “truth of art”. The medium of painting, with its fluid, not wholly controllable spontaneity, crystallizes a personal energy, solidifying on the surface as a chromatic imprint of reality as such, where the artist and the world have merged. Reminiscent of frozen lava flows, Volkov’s masses of color seem to exude “unfiltered reality,” as Jacques Dupin wrote of Antoni Tàpies. The monumental format of the canvases serves as a means of strong, clear, and unambiguous impact on the viewer, who is called upon to share this “truth.”

In his new exhibition, Volkov makes the polysemous word “contour” his central concept, playing on its full range of associations – from drawing, where it denotes an outline that defines the given limits of an object’s external form, to physics, where “contour” serves as a general term for open systems that exchange matter and energy with their environment. He describes free movement, flow, transformation, and connection as the key principles of his method. In doing so, the artist foregrounds openness of boundaries, bringing the creative subject, the artwork, and the external conditions of its existence, above all as they unfold in the viewer’s experience, into a single dynamic whole. For him, painting becomes a metaphor for an electromagnetic field. From this perspective, images tied to energy, radiation, and transmission take on new meanings in the context of impact.

With this interpretive emphasis on his own practice, Volkov places himself within the tradition of Russian abstraction, which in the early twentieth century was strongly shaped by discoveries in physics. From the late Olga Rozanova to Kliment Redko, artists treated painting as a transmitter, a projector, a screen, above all through color. Volkov thinks along similar lines. He exposes the conventional nature of a work’s spatial boundaries, and every detail within it is to be read as an instrument for working with the viewer’s perception. Volkov aims for a psychophysical interaction between the viewer’s gaze and the painted body of his canvases.

Volkov’s paintings draw on a wide range of strategies of impact, producing different kinds of sensation in the viewer. First and foremost is a spatial feeling, a sense of being “inside.” The works’ large scale, often comparable to a human body, compels the viewer to measure themselves against what they are seeing, to “step into” it, or to dive into it as though it were a portal. Alongside this, time-based effects begin to register as well. The visual field is expansive, giving the eye room to move, to wander through the image, to thread its way among details, and to sink gradually into microscopic nuances that at first go unnoticed. The mirror-like gloss of Volkov’s surfaces heightens a sense of uncertainty. The paintings begin to shimmer, and the viewer, looking at them, seems to discern one’s own gaze from within the dark depth of the plane, turned inward toward oneself. Crimson reds, painfully green tones, and dusky purples splinter into shades. At times they clash, pushing through one another’s boundaries in protrusions; at times they give way under mutual pressure, merging into gradients. They act through volume and intensity, completely engaging the visual field and eliciting both acceptance and rejection. These visual sensations are also inflected by temperature associations: the fiery heat of red, or the greenish-azure coolness of the Venetian Lagoon. Finally, the oval canvas format the artist often uses softens the gap between the painting’s inner world and the surrounding space.

All of these features give rise to an extremely dense, concentrated medium, a formal expression of the synthesis of numerous inner conflicts and dramas conveyed in the language of painting. This is the “contour” the artist creates, as he inscribes his own corporeality into the image on the surface. For him, this contour is a fundamentally open structure.The range of affects experienced by the viewer can pull them out of the flow of everyday life and immerse them in a special, slowed temporality where metaphors of energy come alive and begin to resonate. Volkov’s art draws its substance from this mutual merging and enrichment of sensory experience, unspoken, yet felt. As the artist puts it, “a work must move beyond immediate intentions, become an independent entity, reflecting an understanding of things deeper than your own”.

Barnett Newman described the viewer’s encounter with a painting’s self-evidence as a “revelation”. Perhaps, in the present era, this kind of dialogue, conducted without “direct” messages, is the most productive. The painting becomes a model of an immensely complex contemporary reality, dramatically lived through by its author. It cannot be understood rationally; instead, one can respond intuitively to the signals it sends and make room for them within one’s own experience. Perhaps contemporary abstraction finds its strength and persuasiveness precisely in offering this kind of “non-ironic” artistic statement, fundamentally “indirect”, proving once again that “the more horrible this world, the more abstract our art”.

Konstantin Zatsepin