Boris Sveshnikov
March 27 - April 28, 2002
Boris Sveshnikov’s White Nights
“First I see the night and it amazes me.”
Samuel Beckett
Contemporary art is constantly re-writing its history, discovering
in the bygone decades certain radical ideas and new visual strategies
hidden in the layers of time. The art of Boris Sveshnikov(1927-98)
is precisely this phenomena. Here seemingly local situations
acquire universal meanings. As an artist who has survived many
years in the Stalinist labor camps, he reveals to us the fractured
world of Russian consciousness. Today, in the beginning of the
new millennium, he can be viewed as a pioneer of post-modern
imagery capable of identifying with the current world context.
Boris Sveshnikov’s drawings, created in the steppes of
Western Siberia and the Ukhta taiga under the watchful eyes
of prison guards, unexpectedly form cross-connections and dialogues
with the fantasies of Callot and Goya, virtuoso theatricality
of Watteau, the inner moods of the Roman compositions by Cy
Twombly, Yves Tanguy’s seascape drawings, and the ornamentalism
of Ron Kitaj. Their high drama rhymes with the mystical revelations
of William Blake and Russian constraints depicted in Dostoyevsky’s
The House of the Dead. They are reminiscent of Botticelli’s
translucent illustrations to Dante’s Hell and also bring
to mind the minimalist lucidity and radiance of Sol Lewitt.
Boris Sveshnikov overcomes the materiality and monotonous routine
of the labor camp life artistically and naturally transforming
its tragic repetitiveness into Biblical scenes of epic magnitude
unconnected to any concrete time. Dissolved in white and in
the state of weightlessness the lofty subject matter of his
compositions evolve strangely into carnival-like processions,
a dream world, transcending the confines of cruel reality. Born
of the proverbial Russian responsiveness and love of, “the
ancient stones of Europe”, to quote Dostoyevsky, the magical
fantasies of Boris Sveshnikov become a symbol of the negation
of the Faustian rationalized culture, appearing to us as images
of pure vision.
Free as breathing, these phantasmagoric pictures -- despite
their improvisational lightness – delineate from the confines
of genre techniques. They become a form of artistic consciousness
allowing the artist to combine fundamental cultural principles
and burning post-modernist reflections within a single space.
Their potential is capable of coming to life on any material
and in any form. In the 1950s, using nothing but his pen, ink,
and paper, Boris Sveshnikov managed to achieve then what has
been integrated in Bill Viola’s projects today, where in
his creation of video-art imagery early Renaissance pictures
and modern drama jointly meet.
Boris Sveshnikov’s meta-language reveals the unity of humankind,
its history and culture, in our post-catastrophe times.
Within the single system of images he combines wandering comedians
of the 18th century French Enlightenment, the Russian 20th century
prisoner lost in the boundless Siberian steppes, and the American
farmer of the beginning of the third millennium, retaining his
ties with the soil and his dignity in the manner of
Henry Thoreau.
For more information contact theGary Tatintsian Gallery
525 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
Tel: 212 633 0110 e-mail: info@tatintsian.com
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