The Russian Academy Of Arts

Tsereteli Art Gallery presents Anatoly Chechik’s united composition of ninety paintings living and breathing its “ninety” souls, ninety pulsing fragments of one and the same organism – but still absolutely independent paintings of diverse formats and even genres (Chechik has worked against all existing good manners in painting – each of them is able to “live its own life”, but together they are inseparable).

The composition of each painting finds its natural continuation in its two neighboring ones – thus the space of quantum-picture is connected with the entire chain like genes in the genome. “Life stream”, “line of life” appear as a real flow, a line (naturally not rectilinear but broken as corridors of the labyrinth). It is a “Dom-ino” (as it was thought by Le Corbusier, Chechik is an architect by his first education), giant puzzle, temple frieze, “Pergamon altar”, material, corporal losses of which are restored through holograms of memory. 

The extreme points of this row are not synonyms. In the real space of the hall the chain is closing having twined around the four walls and placed a visitor in the virtual space multiplied by signs of time – everyday, historical, mythological, cultural, sacral. Multi-centered perspective, according to the philosopher Pavel Florensky,  gradually creates a complicated visual image, where the past and future meet in the present.

The time does not divide itself into parts, it ties itself up together: from the “Tree of Knowledge” to “Cornel Jam”; from “Minotaur” to “Jacob’s Ladder”; from  the “Grinder” to the “End of Trojan War”.

His topics migrate one from another, resound with each other.  Everyday life and routine become a myth. A myth becomes a lyrical digression.

The idea of coming back, repetition prevails in this image of time. However, it is no use remembering the notions of linear and cyclic time. Here times are not in opposition. There are no events here, from which we count up and down. Moreover, everything can become “key”, a point of bifurcation giving birth to further sprouts of pictorial intertext  forming a huge “database” of  the history of a single man,  artist for whom the history of mankind is his own one.

Everything is “as if”, and everything is “in reality”.
The Labyrinth by Anatoly Chechik is his successive solo exhibition. It is a result of his latest work. The show is logic to be held under the canopy of both the Russian Academy of Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art as there is no professional term yet to define the type and genre of the Labyrinth, the work that breathes the “soil and fate”.

We can see the painting in its high classical sense, but the art history has not known anything similar to its existence, in fact, it is a huge installation. The Labyrinth is not only painting, it is more than an object, diary, memoirs (though there is no need in doubting the confessionary character of the “cycle”), “actual”, intellectual game subordinated here to poetic rows (usually expelled from the actual art). It is a spectacle of a special kind claiming attention, sympathy and meditation.

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