Miscellaneous. Chuikov I.

“Everything that is written - explanations, interpretation of work - is completely unnecessary. The secret, the mystery of the image as such is generally impossible to state in words, ”said Ivan Chuikov. Nevertheless, he tried - and he succeeded. Not all artists own the word - their material is different. But conceptual artists, as a rule, owned them, the meaning of their activities, in fact, partly consisted in the study of the boundaries between the word and the image: often conceptualist works are reduced in the commentary or documentation of a real-missing picture image.

Ivan Chuikov (1935-2020), the classic of Russian non-appropriate art, unlike many of his colleagues, was engaged in this kind of research without leaving the fine field-his verbal and analytical gift was realized in an interview and letters. Of these, he himself compiled this book, but, unfortunately, did not manage to see it published. Moreover, the book represents not only the author. It allows you to consider from the inside the artistic movement that the author belonged and in which was one of the main figures - but to consider in a very individual optics, the optics of a born painter, a person of “visual talent”. “It all starts not with any idea that you need to present in the picture, object or installation, but always from a certain visual idea, visual image-I just want to make such a picture, such an installation. And all the explanations - a posteriori - attempts to rationally explain, understand yourself what is the matter. "