Boris Kocheishvili exists outside any system, in a reality perpendicular to the present day. I guess I should better describe such a person in a free manner. So, this text is hardly a curator's article. It's just an essay, an attempt to capture the unique outline of the artist's personality.

ME and THEM

"Me and Them. Them and I," Boris Kocheishvili wrote on the door of his studio almost half a century ago. It is easy to imagine who they are: viewers, art critics, friends, lovers, brushes and paints. But who is this Me? What is he like? A portrait of the artist, his appearance, his habits, his way of life – all of this is essential to history.

ACQUAINTANCE

We first met in Tarusa, on a hillside near the Oka river. Boris lived in a dilapidated house with steps into a garden overgrown with nettles and burdocks. The artist asked me, an art student who had invited herself to see his work, to seat on a chair opposite a roughly planked outdoor easel, brought out a thick pile of Whatman watercolor paper sheets, and silently started putting them on the easel. I couldn't stop staring at his stunning works. Then I ran home, took all my savings, and bought one piece, a still-life with slanted bottles. Later I visited the artist's studio on Chisty Lane in Moscow. I came once, and then again... A newly graduated art historian with no clue about the art business, I was eager to make people see and love Boris Kocheishvili's works. I started promoting him on forums, organizing exhibitions, presentations, and sales.

PORTRAIT

He is a rather short, handsome man with massive facial features, a large nose and lips, and unruly hair. He has a mellow voice. He sings and plays his own tunes, though he has never mastered musical notation. Kocheishvili's absolute pitch goes beyond music, and he is extremely sensitive to any false notes, be it in behavior, images, or words. He is nervous as a sculpture by Giacometti. In the 1990s, he suddenly started writing poetry. The literary world welcomed the newcomer; his poems were published and included in anthologies. Boris has not been affiliated with any group or trend for many years. He lives and works in his studio in the Arbat lanes, between the Kremlin and the Moscow City International Business Center, close to the Academy of Arts. Still, the artist is infinitely distant from public life. "I have shut myself off from the world with my work," he says. His social circle consists of two or three close friends. One of them is Yuri Pogrebnichko, artistic director of the Okolo theater. For a long time, Boris would come to the theater almost every day. If there was no performance, he would watch a rehearsal, draw actors or drink tea in the director's office.

CHILDHOOD

Boris remembers how he "liberated" Berlin as a child. In May 1945, his father took the boy on a car ride in the city, telling him: "Look and remember!" In the town of Eberswalde, Germany, he saw his first theatrical production. In a small baroque theater, our soldiers staged a play called "Once upon a time. "They brought a live horse on stage, and Boris's father kept whispering in his ear: "That's not a real hussar holding the animal by the bridle. That's our stable boy, Vasya, and our regimental stallion. "The family stayed in Germany for two years. As a parting gift, the local nanny gave Boris a set of watercolors and a brush. "I instantly used up all the paints, wore out the brush, and regretted it very much afterwards," he recalls. Later, his father was sent to Ussuriysk to manage the local House of Culture. That was the place of Kocheishvili's second encounter with art. In the shade of the House of Culture's columned portico, the nine-year-old Boris helped artists from Moscow crumple newspapers and make huge papier-mâché frames for portraits of leaders painted right there on stretched sheets with a dry brush. There it was. "I'm going to be an artist!" The family returned to Elektrostal. To enroll in the Memory of the 1905 Revolution Art School in Moscow, he attended the only art studio in the town. Then came the landmark moment of the entrance exams. The day before, Boris was very anxious, had a bad night, and, as it happens, overslept. "I ran to the station and saw my train moving slowly. A desperate thought came up: "Am I not going to be an artist?" So I sprinted as fast as I could, jumped on the step, and left for Moscow," he says.

THE ARTIST'S HOUSE

Boris has spent half of his life in a studio located in an annex to the Von Meck mansion in Chisty Lane. A steep, dark stairway leads to the second floor. It is bright inside, with light pouring in from three sides through dusty windowpanes. In the center, a thick stove pipe shines with white tiles. The artist built a fireplace in its belly - a crooked hearth that copes well with all its functions: it keeps you warm and cozy and fascinates visiting young ladies. There is no place for unnecessary objects in the studio: "everyday comfort is a foe." Paintings and books pile up everywhere. An antique seven-string guitar, inlaid with mother of pearl, is hanging on the wall, a gift from a girlfriend of a Roma baron. Sheets of paper with poetry lie on the shelves in neat stacks. Boris treats his work and money in a light-hearted way. When asked, "How much is this painting worth?" he would answer: "A million or nothing." He gives away the money he receives from the sale of his works to friends and strangers. Alexander Borovsky, an art critic, calls him "an unsettled artist." In Tarusa, his favorite place for many years, he stays at other people's dachas. In the late 1990s, Boris spent the money he got from art dealers on a plot of land and a house in the town of Kirzhach and moved there with a girlfriend "to build an ideal space." The first thing he did was to build a massive throne-like chair to watch "the horizon." No blissful life has ever materialized: he broke up with the lady and sold the dwelling. But the image of a house persists in his art. A dream house, a phantom house. "My house has fallen right and left" is another line from his poem.

TEACHERS

When I start a conversation with Kocheishvili about his education and teachers, he gets angry: "No one can claim that they have taught me anything." He favors artists like Andrei Rublev, Rembrandt, Titian, Picasso, Malevich, Morandi, and Drevin. He loves Perm wooden sculpture. Items you could add to this list may be counted on the fingers of one hand. He is usually ruthless to everybody else, with a few exceptions. "What I cherish most in the visual world is plasticity. What is plasticity? Ten dancers on the stage would all be doing the same thing, yet you single out the one with plasticity instead of mere dancing skills," Boris says. The artist developed his plastic talent in the storerooms of the Engraving Department of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. He tells how he spent hours and days there, browsing over sheets of old prints. Boris and his colleagues could do that because they studied at the legendary Nivinsky workshop under the guidance of Evgeny Teys, a graduate of VKhUTEMAS and one of the authors of Lenin's tomb. "Teys really gave us a lot," Kocheishvili reluctantly admits. The only person Boris considers his teacher is the sculptor Adelaida Pologova, his closest friend. One day, watching her work with wood, Kocheishvili complained that life had passed, and he had never tried his hand at sculpture. "Boris, dear, you should try doing reliefs," Pologova advised. Boris tried and has been making reliefs to this day. Some of them were purchased by the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum. When Alla died, he was devastated. He cut out photographs of her sculptures from catalogs and pasted them into his works, "settling" these orphans in paradise.

PARADISE

Kocheishvili has several paintings with the title "Paradise": "Paradise I," "Paradise II," "Paradise III," and so on. The artist says that at first, he just wanted to escape from depicting Soviet reality. Still, he began to develop this theme soon and populate his works with ideal women, architectural structures, which could well be standing in paradise, and clearings going far and wide, probably to something even more beautiful... "Paradise, the true Paradise on earth, is poetry, which I have always loved. Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and my favorite later poets are all pieces of Paradise. Other pieces of Paradise available to me belong to Russian architecture. These are all places of Paradise, especially the Pokrov na Nerli church. Sometimes this Paradise may be tragic, like with Rembrandt, Goya, El Greco, or Picasso. "A Girl on a Ball" is an episode from Paradise. Paradise is poetry, Paradise is architecture, Paradise is the divine soul of favorite artists," says Boris Kocheishvili.