Valery Koshlyakov, Moskau
From beauty in ruins to pack-and-pop
Asked about what is Russian in his art, the Moscow artist Valery Koshlyakov will answer evasively. He does not see himself as a reporter of post-Soviet otherness, for example, continuing the tradition of Soc Art, obeying a Western horizon of expectations. He sees himself just as little as a representative of a national art, an understanding of art that is still taken for granted in the tradition-conscious official Russian cultural life. The fact that Koshlyakov, as one of the few young non-conformists, was recently included in the exhibition collection of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the most important museum for Russian art in the country, and is now also represented in the Russian Museum in St Petersburg, does not change his conviction that art is not a national matter. Not that for a wanderer between worlds like him the question of national identity is easy to exclude. (...) As a "child of Perestroika", he was a co-founder of the scandalous artists' group "Art or Death" during his training in Rostov-on-Don. Their actions were not always without consequences, such as the unannounced group exhibition in the "Pink and Sky Blue Salon", namely in the public women's and men's toilet, which was closed by the police after an hour. The unruly young artists aspired from the provincial confines to the centre of the country. In 1989, Koshlyakov moved from Rostov to the Moscow underground scene, as did most of his Rostov companions sooner or later. Here he found his new general theme, which was to become his trademark for the next few years. From now on, the pantheon of world cultural heritage became the motif stock of his artistic output. In doing so, he acted quite contrary to his Moscow environment and the questions that were current there. In the paintings of the "Russian Piranesi", the assembled European art history in sculpture and architecture was transformed into monumental figure studies and architectural vedute. (...) Recently, Koshlyakov has been experimenting with a new anti-aesthetic material, the discovery of which he owes to his fondness for cardboard: packing tape. In his first works he only used the indefinable brownish tape, which was processed in two shades and in several layers. In most cases, the motifs were applied directly to the wall, so that the artwork was only possible in situ, and thus no longer available as an object. He first used this method to design the exhibition "Under Roof" in the Moscow Manege in May 1999.
In a second phase, he has recently started using garishly coloured adhesive tape. With the very limited, standardised palette of striking high-gloss colour values in standardised widths, he creates images whose motifs are now no longer borrowed from "cultural heritage". It is now mostly icons of everyday life that become the reproach, such as the tiger carpet in the installation "Wohnhäuschen" at the Guelman Gallery in 2000, or the quasi-Soviet motifs Young Wheat at Sunrise or Guard of Honour No. 1 from the exhibition "The Sixth Part of the World" of the same year at the Bischoff Gallery. The pictures, partly on coloured plastic foil over stretcher frames, surprise from a distance with their realism, while up close the irritating association with the broad, impasto brushstrokes of expressive painting can hardly be pushed back. As in the first large group of works on world cultural heritage, the viewer is also captivated in the Packband works by the friction between the concretely visible and the emerging illusion, between which perception wanders back and forth. Here, as there, the Koshlyakovian theme can be found: A vision of perfection is possible where, in the dreamy lightness of illusion, its contrast or conflict with realities is also visible and poetically inscribed.
Barbara Wittwer
