An Imaginary Journey to Italy

Boris Kocheishvili's artistic language that took shape in the 1970s is not easy to identify with any movement. For a long time, the artist was pretty alien to official and even unofficial Soviet culture. His graphic art inspired by literary fiction was occasionally shown at exhibitions and even purchased by museums, mainly as an exception.

If works of art are regularly displayed or have currency in a particular community, the public gradually associates their author with a predictable set of recognizable key features. Luckily, Boris Kocheishvili has avoided this kind of cliché: at first glance, the language of his works may seem a hermetic one with little need for external references. His unusually narrow range of topics is limited to compositions with figures, still lifes, and architectural motifs. Such compositions are usually based on landscape structures with generalized spatial plans whose sequence may be altered. In this case, the space loses homogeneity, collapses, and develops voids, while the figures turn into empty silhouettes or emblems.

Kocheishvili's genre scenes include characters in statue-like positions that look frozen even if they are supposed to be moving or playing. The artist often reduces the narrative to the point when fictional characters simply co-exist in a fictional setting.

Speaking of general trends, the process of formalizing plots in Soviet painting started as early as in the "severe style" of the early 1960s, when the search for a new artistic language prevailed over the solution of visual tasks. The crisis of the narrative became evident in the following decade when genre scenes largely disappeared, and artists preferred symbolic motifs, relegating heroes to the periphery of the painting and thematizing empty spaces.

Boris Kocheishvili could experience this crisis relatively early. During a journey to Italy in 1962, he had an opportunity to see the works of artists who were completely foreign to the aesthetics of socialist realism. This «pension year trip" (rarely granted even to established official artists) was an incredible piece of luck for the young graduate of the "Memory of the 1905 Revolution" school of arts, who experienced a veritable culture shock from, say, the rugged canvases of Lucio Fontana. Exposure to the works of Morandi and De Chirico was no less fateful for Kocheishvili.

The legacy of Giorgio de Chirico is routinely described as "metaphysical art," a label that has also become associated with Boris Kocheishvili. Fine, but the definition of "metaphysics" always needs to be clarified because it often implies something profound while explaining very little. In any event, it is about some supersensible experience or a break with empirical reality. De Chirico's invariably fictional images represent ideas that exist in his mind. Since the Italian master defies conventional classical or contemporary art categories, he freely handles fragments removed from various contexts. The main object of his manipulations is the picture itself and the totality of impressions produced by it. De Chirico interprets many of his works as boxes with many recurring elements as if from a children's construction kit.

Boris Kocheishvili's graphic series follow a similar principle. In addition, all his motifs, including still lifes, architectural shapes, and letters, are perceived as equal participants in a theatrical performance, and a box or the theater stage does not limit the space: it is dynamic and seems to be striving to extend beyond the page. One of the artist's favorite genres is a classical landscape with figures. This traditional genre is based on the strict proportionality of elements and symmetrical arrangement of figures in a notional space. However, even when Kocheishvili follows these rules, his compositions are anything but stable: interrupted, brittle or blurred contours do not allow the objects to fit into the landscape, and characters attempting to move just freeze again in another statue-like position.

In contrast to the classic landscape, the relationship between humans and their environment is not harmonious. Instead, Kocheishvili dramatizes this relationship, alienates space from the characters, and presents it as a place of brief stay for vacationers who have neither time nor opportunity to adapt to the setting imposed on them. Moreover, being removed from their familiar environment, these "vacationers" may be wandering far away in their thoughts. This sense of disconnected space and the alienation of consciousness from time and location is pervasive in Chekhov's dramas, to which Boris Kocheishvili frequently returns in his work.

Even in the early Chekhov-inspired drawings from the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts collection, the artist immerses the characters in a dynamic spatial environment where they virtually dissolve. In a "Three Sisters" drawing, the environment absorbs the characters so much that their presence seems fictional. Moreover, the three sisters mentally residing elsewhere have become a cross-cutting theme for Kocheishvili.

Literature and theatre as reference points are so essential for the artist that his genre scenes sometimes feel like illustrations to unwritten plays or sketches for the setting of non-existent plays with space as the protagonist. While his landscapes with distant horizons appear as infinite expanses at first glance, then you almost instantly realize that these "expanses" look more like a detail of a theater set depicting a fragment of imaginary distant space.

The idea of infinity haunted many artists in the era of space exploration. As for the agenda of the "Sixtiers," Kocheishvili is more of a skeptic than a follower, and his works tend to represent "bad infinity", the self-deception of a certain enthusiastic author, who has ostensibly subdued space and time. In the 1930s, this skepticism manifested in the late works of Malevich's disciples, who, for various reasons, tried to "ground" the weightless Suprematist forms and fit them into traditional landscape structures. While this trend can be regarded as a symptom of a crisis of avant-garde thinking, it also helped artists of the following generations rethink the possibilities of artistic expression at a new level, regardless of the binary oppositions such as "abstract vs. figurative," "image vs. sign" and so on.

Human-like figures in Kocheishvili's art readily morph into architectural or still-life motifs, signs, or abstract geometric elements. Still lives can play genre scenes, ornamental baroque vignettes evolve into a landscape composition, and vice versa - Kocheishvili's works are a fascinating interplay of genres in which the very idea of "genre" seems to vanish.

This fluidity of focus stems from the fact that any motif in his art goes from a quite definite (sometimes grotesque) image to a sign, index, or code that helps Kocheishvili transcend (transpass) genre boundaries and discard the plot.

The next and most paradoxical step in this journey is associated with the move to an alternative art form of sculpture. In the mid-1990s, Kocheishvili starts making reliefs. He uses painting knives on plaster to create three-dimensional series of his graphic compositions. Signs are immaterial, and Kocheishvili's graphic art seems too ephemeral to be expressed in sculpture – but in his reliefs, they bulge out in certain areas and disappear depending on lighting conditions. The contradiction between perpetuity and ephemerality is thus resolved. The relief technique blurs the boundary between painting and sculpture by combining the illusory and the actual spatial forms. In some ways, Kocheishvili follows Giacomo Manzu, whose exhibition he could see in Moscow as early as 1966. The art of this sculptor was promoted in the USSR and even found a few imitators, but it is not the case with Kocheishvili; he built on the plastic ideas of his elder colleague by using a painting knife on plaster as if making a graphic sketch on paper. Incidentally, Manzù used cuts more actively than Kocheishvili (one might recall the works of Lucio Fontana, which had once impressed the young Soviet artist so much).

The obvious parallels with the work of Italian artists may suggest that the above-mentioned early trip to Italy had a fundamental influence on Kocheishvili. Still, we should not jump to conclusions. Of course, it's hard to find an artist in history who did not change after a trip to Italy; even today, the rhythms of the contemporary art community largely depend on the pulsation of the Venice Biennale. However, the geography of Kocheishvili's work is much broader, and the artist's Italian trip was but a brief episode that triggered numerous imaginary journeys to domains that cannot exist.