Boris Kocheishvili became prominent on the art scene in the 1970s. His India ink brush drawings on coated paper showed characters, primarily women, walking in parks, relaxing and talking; their figures, responding rhythmically to the curvatures of the space, looked caught in a game of freeze tag or seen in a dream. The plot seemed elusive, yet there were no meaningful hints or suggestions for solving the puzzle. This lightly structured graphic art asserted little except for some flickering that related both to the human body's basic states and those of shapes, and perhaps their (unattainable) equilibrium.

Some intellectual dropped then - probably in a private conversation - the word "theatre" (or maybe even "poetic theatre"). Later the author himself would admit that there is a connection between his art and the stage. "I love theatre. Maybe that’s why my characters seem to come from an unknown theatre performance." At that time, a reference to theatre somewhat explained and partially justified the technique of defamiliarization that made impossible any literal decoding of the graphic imagery and perceiving it as a "message." An interpretation could only rely on general cultural allusions or on identifying metaphors of existential problems of the 1970s and 1980s (anxiety, search for roots, reflections on freedom, fighting terrestrial gravity through art). However, it turned out that all these problems were not that time-specific; the artist's evolution testifies to that by adding new motifs to a relatively stationary framework. Later it also became clear that the emotional scale in these works is much broader than previously imagined: it ranges from Chekhov's melancholic languor ("Three Sisters" is one of the cross-cutting subjects) to the grotesque on the verge of caricature.

In one of his essays, Kocheishvili gives an accurate and detailed description of his art. "Two elements live and fight inside me. One is a free, shimmering, smoke-like, whirling substance in perpetual motion. The other is static, rigid, and simple, like a Russian log house (four flat walls covered with a roof, what could be simpler) or Malevich's Suprematism. I have always been obsessed with combining these two elements within the space of a single sheet of paper. So whenever I'm drawing, I'm trying to bring the two opposites together and make them love rather than hate each other... All art is built on contrasts. What I seek is to bring these contrasts to life and then reconcile them. To reconcile splendor, debauchery, the sweetness of form with asceticism, logic, and metal." These words were uttered when the original range of subjects had already expanded greatly: "people" were complemented with "landscapes" and "architecture" (towers, palaces and churches, gates, bizarre entablature fragments, baroque shards, volutes, and constructivist lattices). Kocheishvili's techniques also diversified; apart from brush drawings in ink, the artist started using fine nibs; later, he mastered watercolor and painting (oil and acrylics on fiberboard), pastel on corrugated cardboard, collages, and plaster reliefs. The author's own description may appear so exhaustive as to prevent any analytical (and even panegyric) intrusion: a "talking" or "writing" artist hardly needs any additional art-speak from outsiders. Nevertheless, we can try to clarify the context of this self-perception and trace its roots, starting from afar, i.e., from Kocheishvili's presumable circle in his early years.

Actually, a "circle" would be a misleading term. Let us be more cautious and talk about a certain shimmering configuration with a distinct nucleus that emerged in the aggregate picture of Russian visual art in the 1970s to cover painters and graphic artists, people from the "deep underground" and those more or less represented at official exhibitions. They lived and worked simultaneously and in the same territory, but it was not a community, just a group of loners cherishing their own "singularity" and avoiding "mass production." If these very different artists had anything in common, it was their desire to escape from the limitations of realism by building a strictly individual "fictional" space, at the time pompously called "the author's world" created by "metaphorists" or sometimes "metaphysicists." In fact, no conventional term for this esoteric trend has ever been coined. Nevertheless, these artists believed in a common language based on a recurring set of characters and symbolic constructions to express some universal "truth" that prevailed over the demands of any specific technique. The overarching subjects united by common motifs rather than any formal features could certainly branch out and include numerous variations, but the unique artistic space remained immutable and could be easily recognized.

Kocheishvili's works are also easy to recognize across time and series. Perhaps their division into series or cycles is a rather technical matter; new cycles tend to start with a transition to a new technique, from painstakingly precise lines to watercolor blurs, from transparency to filled spaces, or vice versa. Incidentally, most "metaphysicists" rarely needed a change of style, so Kocheishvili differed from many for whom the "craft" was a second priority compared to the philosophical message of art. He was all the more alien to the messianic pathos cultivated by his peers; statements such as "I am concerned with the problem of how a figure swings, how it stands" meant an escape from the lofty domain of personal mythology to issues of pure plastics. As if to counterbalance metaphysical eloquence (which, in turn, looked like a reaction to the "cynical talk" of the emerging conceptualism), the lingering subjects of his graphic art and (later) his paintings were – or, rather, have been -- based on deliberately lightweight modules. The space thus organized and these aerial intonations are a hallmark of Kocheishvili's art.

The unstable, long-armed figures struggle to keep balance on the sloping, visibly rounded turf - and more often than not, they fail (one of the works is called "Slanted Women"). The vertical dimension rattles, craving to become a diagonal or fall down altogether; the horizon collapses; the "classical" perspective of parkways and forest trails converges into a dead end. The geometry of space oscillates between a sphere and a cone. His universe is curved, vectorless, and insecure, but its arches suggest a harmony rooted in the style of church icons, and the image of paradise (represented in the eponymous series) involves no symmetry or structural stability.

Incidentally, the artist himself has a different vision of his space. He claims that "my compositions usually rest on the plane of the triangle, the most stable of shapes. A rigid triangle, or a square divided into triangles, is the spatial basis that is gradually populated with baroque forms."⁴ However, it is difficult to hold on to a side of a triangle; moreover, the sudden expressivity of irregular baroque forms can blow up any structure. A road may abruptly turn into a Rocaille curl, the surface of a floor, a wall, or a table may start rolling up into almost a scroll. Architectural motifs or architectural fantasy as a separate theme appeared in Kocheishvili's works in the 1980s (the "First Baroque" series) and soon spread to his art at large. They started intruding into the lives of characters, merge with the landscape, and at times become a landscape themselves. An intricate monogram-like linear configuration may turn out to be a field, a river, or a rock. The man-made becomes indistinguishable and inseparable from nature, a wave hitting a rock produces Baroque-looking splashes of foam, and it turns out that culture only captures these short-lived states of the landscape to convert them into perennial signs of its own. The baroque signs of gust and willpower in Kocheishvili's art collide, interact and enter into a dialogue with the constructivist planes and angles, the symbols of order.

o a large extent, this semiotic principle was rooted in Russian reality. Kocheishvili's Baroque churches suggest a common prototype, the Temple of the Holy Sign in Dubrovitsy (never mind that it was built by Italian masters). The abandoned and almost ruined mansion architecture often used as a background for action can also be recognized as Russian (incidentally, the experience of decay and loss is highly relevant for this author). Beginning around 2000, however, the juxtaposition of objects and people increasingly becomes that of unidentified forms; not only architecture but also "objects" in general (if not directly linked to figurative mise-en-scenes) tend to be reduced to the "abstract." Even when the title of the painting declares a motif (e.g., "Rushes," "Spring," or "Lovers"), the reference proves to be false. Nevertheless, Kocheishvili's abstract art still partly retains the repetition of phenomena such as ovals, triangles, and deltoids. These elements form semantic nests: "wooden" planks converging into a cone turn into a forest clearing ("A Forest," 2007) or architecture ("VDNKh," 2007); narrow planes arranged in a row serve as fenceposts, bend to become reeds, form "A Castle" (2020), or simply symbolize motion ("Movement," 2000). A rectangular piece filled with geometric elements may be called "Autumn. River", but a similar image displaced to the edge of the picture may open a series "Movement towards summer." Note that movement as such is an essential component of this art; it literally materializes in fierce clashes of forms, in unsteady compositional structures on the verge of an instant change, in the motif of openings (windows or portals) that promise an exit to an alternative reality or demonstrate that no such exit is available.

It is certainly possible to imagine this movement as that of theatrical scenery or a curtain. The "Kocheishvili theatre" concept allows us to compare the space of a sheet to a stage box with its structural components (foreground, proscenium, scenery, and backdrop) superimposed on a landscape (with land, water, and a distant forest, or a mountain and the sky). Characters that may be humans, objects, or fictional entities emerge from the backstage, line up by the ramp line or freeze in positions that record some unfinished, unfulfilled impulses, often in defiance of gravity. The scenarios of their behavior are limited, as are the paintings' motifs, yet all these towers and castles, dinners and breakfasts, games and conversations, images of home, and images of paradise look entirely different. This art may be seen as a multitude of director's versions of a play whose constant dramaturgical basis can become unrecognizable with a change of staging accents.

These accents are placed by changing the material and the color scheme, altering the perspective, switching from close-ups to a generalized reduction of shapes, and vice versa. For instance, figures seen from afar appear to belong to the present continuous tense: while something has been going on for some time, the action is not finalized, and the plot can hardly be defined in words. A close up of those same figures, however, shows them joining each other in pairs and groups in a transitory, almost impressionistically captured psychological interaction, in concrete and precisely grasped situations; now they have faces that are almost as individual as the author's portrait drawings (incidentally, these drawings are dotted throughout the artist's entire body of work). A motif that seems transparent and ghostly in a light blue palette changes when the color becomes more saturated and looks entirely different in reliefs (plaster on chipboard or plywood), where the minimalist forms are augmented by tangible plasticity. Whereas views of actual foreign cities and countries "deserve" intelligible linearity (as a matter of appropriation), fictional compositions can dreamily "melt" into faint blurs of paint. Universal cultural prototypes may be incorporated into the poetic narrative in various ways: for example, the three sisters (this Chekhovian subject, a metaphor of restlessness, probably merits a special consideration) painted in color are suddenly granted proper names. Color per se often happens to be the subject: there is a chance to discern a still life or a landscape in the paintings "Gold, Black, and Green," "Blue Light," or "Green and Blue," but these coloristic variations are essentially self-sufficient and do not need any genre-related support.

The artist's own insights into his philosophy are probably more profound than an outside observer can provide. So perhaps it would be appropriate to conclude this attempt at an essay with excerpts from his reflections:

"My repeated attempts at life and nature drawing failed to satisfy me: their results never lived up to my aspirations. The latter varied depending on many reasons, while the former were almost always the same regardless of my fluid disposition that could change not only the hue or color of an object but also everything else: its character, its weight, scale, position in space, relations to other objects and so on."¹

"...For me, the life I want to paint is a blend of the extant and the incredible of things that I heard, noticed, read, and anticipated. A typical example is a ride on a suburban train. The car is moving and making stops; passengers enter, leave, stay silent or talk; the landscape changes; the external world penetrates inside, and the world of the car strives outside, and all that evokes a wholistic feeling. How can you draw that?"²

"Suddenly, a new world re-created from familiar objects started emerging – and it was a fascinating world. I realized that art could be a game, a pastime not alien to irony, absurdity, and mystification..."³

"I have a sheet of paper in front of me. I dip my pen in ink and hastily draw some lines, overcoming the fear of the white surface. A good beginning! Then space begins to form. It takes over your knowledge, experience, skills, and thoughts. All your powers are reduced to making humble suggestions like "take a break," "skip it," or "don't be afraid to wrap it up…"⁴