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I do not consider myself an art expert. However, art is appreciated even by the inexperienced. For me, having lived for decades with prohibitions, art is above all an expression of freedom. And it is freedom that I appreciate more than anything else in the world and that I aspire to know in all its fullness. As I understand it the art of Koulakov creates freedom with the many expressions of textural painting: the colors, the plaster, the metal, the unusual chromatic compositions similar to distant flashes of lightning (yes, distant flashes of lightning because I have seen so few in my life), the attempts to exceed-the traditional dimension of the painting, the images, the jarring view of natural alterations, the movement of the hand, the gesture of the artist and his work as an act, a message, as something which is in constant formation, now fast, now slow... All these are elements of freedom which the painter offers to the colors themselves, allowing them to run and form a multitude of uncontrolled combinations. The artist uses an infinity of "materials" and methods to acquire a new type of spontaneity. It would be wrong to see the art of Koulakov as a game, as an end in itself. Freedom is real only when it expresses something genuinely new. The old past is not freedom, it is death, it is nonexistence, which we approach, or from which we distance ourselves volontarily in the most diverse periods of our existence. Mikhail Koulakov places the essence of existence both in what is commonly considered important and in what is commonly considered "insignificant" - and that is new. The artist exploits themes of the cosmos, the origin of life, the deification of the Being-Orant, the Madonna, the Apocalypse, or simply the miracle of a mountain or a kiss. His Royal Portal opens towards the unknown, it is improbable that his Martian comes from Mars, Boldino's Autumn is pure abstraction without any connection to Pushkin. Koulakov's paintings often lack objects, they are about space located on the surface of a painting, about conflict, about a shower of fire, and about the juxtaposition of two unlike elements, falling water and showering fire. I delight in the freedom of the works of Mikhail Koulakov, in their use of unusual themes or in their absence of subject, in their combination of colors and their compositional solutions. But are they indeed solutions? At times it seems that Koulakov operates by intuition, the sister of freedom. I expect many things from him, all unpredictable and marvelous in their freedom. |