Alexander Sukholit. THE LAND

XXI century art is not interested in the issues of cosmogony, it is more inclined to deal with particularities: with specific representations of human nature, social mems, historical facts. There is no a human being as such in contemporary world. Rather, there are entrepreneurs, civil servants, pensioners, collectors and artists, there are dozens of people looking at us from the covers of Forbes, there are the homeless. Each of them is sorted according to one of several hundreds of classifications. We label ourselves and others with such ease and change those labels with even more ease. We just like to give proper names to everything. This passion is generated by the logic of the market. Because only those things that are defined can be used, only those named have their prices – either real or symbolic. It is the price we have to pay to have a scientifically determined world that consists of figures, schemes, tables and classifications. It is such approach to seeing the world that has been gradually removing the mythological and pre-rational logic since the times of the Renaissance. It has forced out the abstract models of myths that used to explain everything.

Alexander Sukholit is an artist who resists the rules of the game that contemporary world imposes on us. He refuses to manipulate with particularities and keeps on his exclusive work with universal categories, willing to get back to the “childhood of mankind” filled in with metaphysical sense. He is still an artist-demiurge, he can command the time, drastically change the direction of its flow. His approach varies in time: sometimes he goes back to the cosmogony of the ancient, to the archaic, then he turns to Christian mythology. There are only archetypical images, stories and topics in his art. The principal figures of his work are always those of a universal character: the first man, the woman-mother, the child. The elements of nature such as land and water are also often present. And the aim of the artist as seen in each of his work is to fixate an act of creation, to stabilise a shifty balance between the material, corporal, carnal and the metaphysical, spiritual, sublime.

Sukholit is a modernist who was born in a Post-Modern era. His art would most certainly fit into the company of Gaugin, Matisse, Maillol, Rodin – because he is not just looking for a lost paradise, so sought after by the artists of the early XX century, but he actually finds it. Using all plastic possibilities that art provides, the whole kit of tools that have been stored and developed for centuries, he just recreates it, raising it from the ashes before us and making a distrustful viewer trust him. Sukholit’s works address our genetic memory, the memory of our body, they ignore all cultural layers, experience and knowledge as parts of scientific vision of the world. His plastique is understandable on the level of consciousness, one wants to touch it, it needs that contact. His drawings, also, neither represent, nor express, nor illustrate, nor name. They just show, literally let observe the things that will never occur again.

The present project exhibited in the White Space illustrates the development of one of several important storylines of Sukholit’s art. It is about the appearance of a human dimension in the space. About the separation of a human and the Earth. About jealousy, fratricide and repentance. About the pain that is caused by cognition and about the art born by the desire to cease this pain.

Olga Balashova