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...his paintings and installations draw upon a rich synthesis of Russian, European, American and Oriental traditions. This highly expressive, almost visceral, collaboration with the surface of the canvas or the sheet of paper brings to mind the cutting of a surgeon's scalpel or the beating on a shaman's drum... ...What are the intention, function and purpose of Kulakov's fields of lyrical abstraction? To respond to this question, we should refer once again to the tendencies of the early 20th century, especially as refracted in the work of Aleksandr Drevin, Elena Guro, Kandinsky and Mikhail Matiushin. Unlike Kazimir Malevich, Liubov Popova and Vladimir Tatlin with their more geometric styles, these other avant-gardists constituted a lyrical and expressive precedent which, consciously or unconsciously, Kulakov has extended and developed. Even Lev Bruni produced gestural, non-objective drawings in 1920 and Aleksandr Rodchenko matched New York Abstract Expressionism with his Expressive Rhythms of 1943-44, looking like the action paintings of Pollock, Hans Hartung and, for that matter, Seshu. This more Romantic moment of the Russian (and international) avant-garde was driven by a rejection of narrative and a prioritization of emotional and psychological spontaneity, captured immediately in unpremeditated gestures and hurried blobs of paint. The physical action, too, of casting paint upon the canvas or paper instantly, if not always haphazardly, was a violent ravishment of material reminiscent of Mikhail Vrubel's shattering of the surface with his palette knife as in paintings such as Lilacs (1900). On this level, Vrubel and Kulakov are, literally, iconoclasts. Perhaps for the enlightened painter and poet, physical contact with the material on hand (paper, canvas, board) and the entanglement therewith is always part of a religious ritual inasmuch as the ultimate goal of any work of art is, presumably, not to reproduce a total illusion of positivist reality, but, rather, to elicit the divine music of the spheres, and this liturgical principle is central to Kulakov's oeuvre. In this sense, touch and go (touching the canvas with paint so as to cross into an ulterior space) is the driving force. Consequently, Kulakov might well argue that the true mission of art is to replace chemistry with alchemy, physics with metaphysics and astronomy with astrology; and his spectacular renderings of the cosmos (cf. Cosmos, 1959, Cosmogony, 1967) would seem to accomplish that mission. Perhaps for the enlightened painter and poet, physical contact with the material on hand (paper, canvas, board) and the entanglement therewith is always part of a religious ritual inasmuch as the ultimate goal of any work of art is, presumably, not to reproduce a total illusion of positivist reality, but, rather, to elicit the divine music of the spheres, and this liturgical principle is central to Kulakov's oeuvre. In this sense, touch and go (touching the canvas with paint so as to cross into an ulterior space) is the driving force. Consequently, Kulakov might well argue that the true mission of art is to replace chemistry with alchemy, physics with metaphysics and astronomy with astrology; and his spectacular renderings of the cosmos (cf. Cosmos, 1959, Cosmogony, 1967) would seem to accomplish that mission. John Bowlt and Nicoletta Misler, Huston , USA and Rome |