A porcelain face, a short haircut, narrow shoulders, a wide unisex coat. Leonid Tskhe has been listening to Swans for twenty years. He dresses in vintage second-hand shops, but some details – a scarf, a belt or a beret – are from today’s brands. “Yes, I like to show off in clothes, I appreciate the cut, the silhouette. At the same time, I am an introvert.” Outwardly, it is quite easy to assume that you are looking at an artist. Soft, a little extravagant and often withdrawn, especially when he smokes. And he has been smoking since the eleventh grade. The artist was initially represented by the St Petersburg “Name Gallery”. Since 2019, Tskhe has been collaborating with Moscow’s OVCHARENKO gallery. Celebrating the fifth anniversary of the collaboration, the gallery is releasing a catalogue of the artist’s works created during this time. On this occasion, art historian and curator Andy Shab spent a week with the artist in September in Berlin, finding out what it means to be contemporary.
Leonid Tskhe: Pavel Gerasimenko. He was the first to spot me. I mean his review of our graduate show at the PRO ARTE Institute in the spring of 2015.
A.: Preparing for our talk, I have read reviews of your personal shows, of which there were not many, actually. It immediately catches the eye that Pavel has somewhat become your unofficial, self-appointed chronicler. And this is great luck, I think, given he is the leading art critic in the city. At the most important moments, he is nearby, observing with knowledge and enthusiasm your creative evolution and transformation from a graphic artist to a painter. After the graduate show, there was a series of exhibitions at the Name Gallery, in which your solid graphic background largely determines your painting style. And then The Boy and the Ball of Thread at the OVCHARENKO eventually manifested your new “aggregate” state – a painter.
L.: Yeah, that’s right. But I’ve just thought that if we’re talking about the very beginning, it was my teacher, Andrey Pakhomov, who discovered me. This is probably the starting point, because if it weren’t for him, there would have been nothing else. It was only thanks to Pakhomov that I was accepted into the academy. After the architecture class at the art school, I couldn’t draw a nude model, while you need to be able to do this at the time of admission to the academy. Pakhomov largely drew attention to the fact that I have a rare sense of composition. Later on, I found out that he had repeatedly spoken in my favour, when his colleagues in the academy wanted to expel me.
A.: What image of your teacher have you retained?
L.: Pakhomov was an authority, an absolute authority in the graphics department. A major and practising artist, greatly in demand, genuine. And I think it’s also important that he had good taste. He had a spacious studio, a voguish Cannondale bicycle in the kitchen and a cool music collection of CDs. There were Swans, whom I’ve been listening to ever since, John Zorn, Frank Zappa, Marilyn Manson, Tom Waits, The Tiger Lillies, The Future Sound of London, Goldie and similar trendy and alternative stuff. He used to go to Sergey Kuryokhin’s “Pop Mechanics” performances every year. I joined him once, although I didn’t know anything about it. All these years he was my guide in the world of art and contemporary alternative culture.
A.: Yep, the environment determines consciousness no less than education. But here, not everything seems to add up: you graduated from the academy in 2007, while your collaboration with the “Sever-7” (North-7) art group and studies at the PRO ARTE happened in the mid-2010s …
L.: Pakhomov not only taught me, but also brought me back into the art system. After the academy, I was involved in children’s illustration (together with my wife Svetlana), and I worked a lot in the construction industry, painting interiors. (Once we decorated a private mansion in London, thanks to which I was able to see Francis Bacon’s works live at the Tate!) In 2010, Pakhomov was appointed to supervise the creative graphics workshop (something like a postgraduate course). He invited me to teach at the academy and join this workshop, eagerly wanting us to do something more experimental there. Actually, strange stagings, a fascination with Bacon, nervous drawing, a trembling line, thickly rubbed – all this was born, manifested, tested there, in Pakhomov’s creative workshop.
A.: Do you mean that experimental stagings, the very idea of the “performative drawing”, emerged before Sever-7 made them its brand?
L.: Yes, one day Nestor Engelke, who lived on the floor above, visited our workshop. Then came Alexander Tsikarishvili. They were excited about what we were doing. So, Sever-7 joined in, pouring fuel onto the flames, so to speak. We did “performative drawing” sessions at the academy and at the Sever-7 space. But in terms of initiation into contemporary art life, the PRO ARTE institute was a no less important experience. It appeared to be a completely new planet, with a huge amount of fresh visual and theoretical information on contemporary art.
A.: You quickly felt cramped within the graphics genre and Petersburg. If we talk about top Moscow galleries of the time, theoretically, the only good choice you had was between Elena Selina’s XL and OVCHARENKO?
L.: I think the fact that I ended up with Vladimir Ovcharenko was largely thanks to the artist Sergey Bratkov, who consulted the gallery. We met at the PRO ARTE, when Sergey was teaching a short course. He made a strong impression on me back then, both with his art practice and the way he talked about it. The transition to the new gallery followed after my show Stagings at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. This was a turning point in many ways. For instance, I stopped teaching at the academy. Stagings was the final exhibition-experiment with my students. Besides, I was eager to completely overcome graphic elements on canvas. The OVCHARENKO gallery helped me by scaling me up, which is important, when you are doing painting.
A.: Your art practice, however, is largely based on drawing. This is not typical for contemporary art, where there are practically no academies left. That distinguishes you, sets you apart, because you brought something of your own, new and contemporary to the field of graphics. More to the point, in retrospect, one may say that your method of deconstructing academic drawing – or what Alexander Borovsky calls “deskilling” — left a significant mark not only on your personal practice, but also on the Petersburg art scene. You famously depicted the Sever-7 parties, conveying their experimental, punk spirit. Likewise, it was an important element in the training of your students, among whom there are quite a few emerging stars: Lera Kuznetsova, Danila Vasiliev, Alina Kugush, Tatyana Chernomordova. In short, you have achieved a strong position in graphic art and your own recognisable style and voice. But it seems like you are deliberately parting with all this?
L.: Well, it’s not exactly new and my method. The idea was on the surface. But to deconstruct academic drawing, one needs to know how to draw academically. (Both laugh.) I believe that it’s much easier to find your own voice in graphics. All you need is a sheet of paper and a pencil that follows the movement of your hand. Handwriting is always individual, and graphics is a continuation of handwriting. However, in the graphics medium everything rather quickly becomes clear and predictable, and there aren’t many ways to go. Hence, I started to drift towards painting. At first, I tried to transfer the graphic situation onto canvas, but immediately realised that paper is not equal to canvas. You can’t simply copy a drawing onto canvas. So, much in my art practice had to be changed or adjusted. Unlike graphics, painting is not an instant art, it’s highly mediated, defined by the format of the canvas, and it takes much longer to complete. And, most significantly, at the beginning, your work always looks like all the paintings that were made before you. It’s very easy to drown in it, and all your shortcomings come to light. Finding your own voice in this medium is a way more difficult task. For instance, Old Masters’ drawings differ significantly from each other, but in paintings that difference is smoothed out, since everything is subject to the more rigid format of the canvas and the general principle of the picture’s construction. However, once obtained, the artist’s voice in painting is stronger due to the qualities of the medium.
A.: It seems that Vlad Kulkov was right to call you “the risk-taker”. Your graphic practice was based on and defined by solid training, but you plunged into painting, having nothing like that behind you?
L.: Fortunately, I was not taught painting at the academy. Only watercolour and pastel. Monumental painting considered itself an elite department. Hence, people there used to say: “Graphic artist, get lost!” (Laughs.) This snobbishness dates back to Soviet times, when monumental painting was in high demand and esteem (because of its ideological potential), in contrast to graphic art. So, I have mastered painting myself, moving intuitively and experimentally. But it’s worth it! The possibilities of painting as a medium are endless. It feels like you can do whatever you want. But, as I’ve already said, it’s much more difficult to maintain your voice in painting. I read or consulted with colleagues about the technical aspects of painting. I experimented with watercolour to master the surface. There was once an excursion into sculpture to learn how to form a volume in the space of painting. And so on. The black and white series helped me reboot in painting colouristically. I completely got rid of graphic elements. Working only within the black and white register, I achieved a painterly effect to a greater extent, because it became exclusively about the surface, tonal issues and transitions. After a long mental pause, caused by the 2022 events, colour has returned, along with clarity of contour and precision. It happened in Germany.
A.: Was your formal search shaped by any external impulses?
L.: Well, to move on, you need fuel, nourishment, external impulses, as you say. At different times, they were Pakhomov, the academy, Sever-7, PRO ARTE, etc. In Germany, I was very lucky to be part of Manfred Stumpf’s conceptual drawing class. In general, everything matters: the space of the studio, access to materials, communication with friends and family. The gallery’s anniversary catalogue presents projects for the last five years after Stagings. This period coincides with the birth of Marusya and her growing up; she is part of many works. This time also coincided with the beginning and end of the pandemic. The large black and white series appeared back in 2021. At that moment, I had increased anxiety and was in a very depressed state, and the series turned out to be a premonition of an even greater impending tragedy. One may say that the recent works are about living through terrible times, about violence and the fear of losing what you love, the vulnerability and fragility of the world, yearning and tragedy, which has scattered everyone, and, therefore, about imaginary embraces. Everything is created out of some kind of communication or lack of it. We have just watched Tino Sehgal’s performance (This is Joy in the New Palace in Sanssouci Park in Potsdam – A. Sh.). I really liked it. Such an elegant and witty infusion of the contemporary into a classical ensemble.
A.: This performance reminded me of your early graphic art, in which you deconstructed academic drawing.
L.: Yep, our experimental stagings with students in various Petersburg palaces came to my mind as well.
A.: You are fairly well represented in the main public and private contemporary art collections in Russia. So far, Antwerp’s M HKA is the only Western collection you’ve got into, being part of the Sever-7 group. No doubt the isolation of the Russian art scene, which could only worsen in recent years, does not help. But theoretically, where do you see yourself in the context of contemporary Western painting? Your novelty in relation to other artists – to what extent do you reflect on it?
L.: I find Peter Doig interesting. I believe I have similar intentions. I was especially impressed by his work in Cologne. Artists have this: if something catches your eye and you immediately want to run and paint – if you have that feeling, then this is it. In that work, he did not introduce anything new, but it looks very fresh. Especially next to the modernists, hanging nearby. At the same time, Doig was surely looking at Munch: compositional solutions, the matte surface of the canvas that absorbs paint … Daniel Richter is also cool, I especially appreciate his early works. In a sense, you are already thinking rather about what you should not do. But in general, it is too early for me to talk about my recognisable voice and place in contemporary painting. I am only just starting. There is a feeling that the most important is yet to come.
L.: “The contemporary is the untimely!” (Laughs.) That essay, indeed, surfaced at one of Pro Arte’s seminars. I read it with a dictionary and difficulty, but with enthusiasm. As for painting, I had an almost immediate issue with the Sever-7 group about that. (Laughs.) For me, it is still an impossible obstacle to go beyond the canvas. I tried several times and stopped. At the same time, Sever-7 has been well-known up to now for crossing these boundaries. For them, a painting is a means, part of a performance, a decoration; they can stick something on it or put it on something. That’s generally fine with me. But when they tried to do it with my work, that immediately irritated me, drove me crazy. So, I forbade them to touch my paintings. They had to accept it. For me, the surface of a painting has always been a sacred space that cannot be desecrated. It is not a phobia, because I have no fear of what I am doing. But I do not like it visually, aesthetically. Again, I am talking only about my own art practice. For example, I very much appreciate Alexander Tsikarishvili’s approach. It looks natural, fresh and cool in his case. He glues something to the canvas: dolls, snot … smokes, screws in some light bulb, and it is no longer a painting, but an installation object that exists in space. But personally I do not work in the installation genre and am ready to defend my boundaries.
A.: Isn’t it a fear of leaving your comfort zone?
L.: No, quite the opposite, I think it’s a challenge. Today, the comfort zone is to throw everything out, to once again violate the boundaries of the canvas. For me, it’s too obvious and a somewhat banal strategy to destroy the canvas or make an object out of it. This is the first thing that comes to mind in the contemporary art context. The challenge is to be inside the canvas, to expand the boundaries of its space, being inside it.
A.: In the history of 20th-century art, the boundaries of the canvas were often violated out of a desire to overcome the painting’s commodification.
L.: Well, today even conceptual, critical, and left art are as easily becoming commodities. This simply no longer works as an argument for me. Anything can be turned into a commodity. I believe that an artist can avoid reproach for making commercial art only if or when s/he experiments, searching for something, whatever the market. As an artist, I do nothing to please anyone. I don’t take commissions, I don’t paint portraits, etc. As soon as I start to sense that I’m repeating myself, I drop everything, take a break, switch to something else, something new. For example, I had a well-known and commercially, perhaps, the most successful early cycle of works, in which I deconstructed academic aesthetics. The public really liked it, there was a clear demand. However, for me it was one of the creative stages, important, but which passed rather quickly. And despite a direct request from the gallery, I do not make such works anymore. Because I need to move on. This movement is what probably saves me from becoming a commercial artist. It is important to constantly experiment, to move towards a certain goal. The latter is constantly on the horizon, but with each of my attempts to get closer, it moves further away.
A.: “It is like being on time for an appointment that one cannot but miss.” This is likewise about the artist’s evolution!
L.: Agamben also employs a nice metaphor of “being contemporary” as the impossibility of keeping up with the light in the darkness of the expanding Universe. I am fond of photography and therefore understand this metaphor. The passing light can be caught by a light-sensitive matrix or film, and then it settles on the surface. Or you can imagine that you are standing at night with a camera on a long exposure and catching this distant light. Gradually, a small part of the photon light is recorded, hits the light-sensitive element, and leaves its mark. The result is the image of a star, no matter how distant it is. Some photons will still reach the matrix, and will be caught. And the rest, what cannot be caught – you may still guess about, anticipate. You can intuitively assume what is further there; you can try to guess and convey it with your art.
A.: Sounds nice. But within such an exclusively formal search, there is a risk of losing the conceptual connection with reality, isn’t there? I believe that a certain synchronisation with one’s own time – its problems, challenges, qualities, sensibilities – is also necessary. I am not even talking about the responsibility that an artist sometimes takes on as a public figure.
L.: Are there many such examples?
A.: Oh yes. I am generally in favour of art students being taught a full course in art history! (Both laugh.) To begin with, the core idea behind the first art academies in late Renaissance and Baroque Europe was to emphasise the intellectual character of the artist’s profession, as opposed to the purely manual, craft-based one, with which they had been exclusively associated up until that point. So, the first artists that come to my mind are, for instance, Jacques-Louis David, Géricault with his “The Raft of the Medusa”, Delacroix, Courbet, among many others. Or the more recent examples of intellectual painters: in Russia – Eric Bulatov; in the West – Anselm Kiefer with his cycle of works on the Holocaust. It is another story that the political or social relevance of some of their works has gradually become obscured over time, and we are now reconstructing all of these conceptual layers within the framework of the social history of art. What is significant, however, is that we remain interested in these works and artists, because their freethinking often went hand in hand with the innovative pictorial language of their art. To be sure, the conceptual connection of an artist with his/her time is not limited to the socio-political agenda – it is much broader.
L.: Yes, for instance, Doig has much to do with contemporary mass culture, cinema and its sensibilities. Interesting! There is something to think about.
A.: It seems to me that one of your conceptual connections with contemporary life is your obsession with self-identification through painting, which one may legitimately contextualise in a broader topic of changing social normativity today.
L.: Indeed, the more I delve into painting, the more I am interested in the theme of human identity and, particularly, in the merging of different normative beliefs associated with it, including in the history of the genre itself. For instance, how do gender and academic/modernist form relate? In this search, everything counts: my academic training, immediate social reality, family, daughter, my own body, the Old Masters and contemporaries. As I formally reassemble a conventional classical painting, this inevitably entails changes in its substantive, pictorial and conceptual aspects: composition, protagonists, ideas about corporeality and normativity. By means of painting, I, thus, construct or reveal a certain universal, androgyne, identity, and this happens every time through personal living experience. My psychosomatic state, thoughts, everything is automatically transferred there, reflected. These experiences of living a painting have changed me as a person, mentally emancipating me. But here one also needs to avoid another problem — graphomania! (Laughs.)
A.: Returning to “anachronisms”, there is one more thing that intrigues me in your recent work. The driving force of art, the guarantee of its renewal, has often been the protest of new generations of artists against the dominant visual forms and the ideologies behind them: modernists argued with academics, conceptualists with minimalists, and so on. I may say that your graphic-based deconstruction of academic aesthetics is your generational dispute with its Soviet representatives and legacy. But your turn to the Old Masters, what is that? Is it a sign of weakness or strength?
L.: This is a sign of impudence. (Laughs.) But seriously, there is no ambition to compete with the Old Masters. In general, my interest in them emerged as soon as I immersed myself in the painting practice. Sources of inspiration I may find in life, in situations, and in powerful art. On the whole, I am not interested in classical painting in general, but in specific masters. I am thrilled, seeing the surface of Goya. I look at how the Old Masters make the surface, gradations, background, glazes, and build up space. This is the original source. Why should I look at, say, Michaël Borremans, when I can check the original source – Rubens? But everyone has done that: Manet, Picasso, and other modernists. These things work archetypally: plots, forms, schemes. If you do something that refers to a common archetype, then it works. Comparing yourself with the Old Masters is also a tuning test. Indeed, artists argue with each other, but they also steal from each other. Normal practice. But in the end, I do not make classical, but contemporary painting.
A.: In what other ways do you feel “anachronistic”?
L.: Well, I am not institutionalised.
A.: But you were always represented by a gallery.
L.: Yes, that’s true. But I’m at odds with the art system, with its theory, bureaucracy (applications, competitions, prizes, residencies) and grant agenda.
A.: I keep thinking about how “anachronism” and being contemporary are connected in Agamben’s argument. Perhaps, he means that something will be contemporary even in ten, fifty, or a hundred years. It’s like with classical texts: they were written centuries ago, but still remain relevant, contemporary today. And then, in order to retain that quality of the work, an artist should be in conceptual synchrony with his/her time and at the same time keep a distance from it, be in his/her own flow.
L.: It is curious that working for “eternity” is still a relevant attitude for academic painters.
A.: But they haven’t yet satisfied the first criterion and that’s been the case for a long time. (Both laugh.)
Berlin
September 2024