Vasily Shulzhenko
Joseph Piccillo
Moscow painter Vasily Shulzhenko makes ambivalent references to a heroic past in his exhibit at Maya Polsky. The Atlantes shows two men holding up not the world or the heavens but protruding portions of the apartment building behind them. A man sweeping the pavement doesn’t even come up to their knees, making them seem giants–but ordinary, somewhat absurd ones.
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In the ironic Venus in Moscow, a nude Venus seems to float on a white sheet outside an apartment window. Even the windowsill blends classical allusion with urban grit: sitting on it are a sculpted woman’s head, household objects that include a teapot, and a rat. Venus’s flesh is as light and transparent as Shulzhenko ever paints it, which is to say not very, but there are bright areas reflecting light from above, and the skin looks supple. At the same time this figure clearly diverges from the classical ideal: wearing a slight smirk, she has the expression and hairdo of an everyday modern woman. While Shulzhenko’s Venus retains a certain grandeur, even a bit of the majesty and power one finds in old masters, she also resembles the two Atlases: she’s a figure you might see on any street.
The idea of individual freedom has never fared well in Russia, which may explain why the limited autonomy of Shulzhenko’s figures seems at once contingent and poignant. Diogenes shows a man wearing a somewhat goofy smile huddled before an old section of pipe. Is this the philosopher himself or the honest man Diogenes is said to have sought? Though the figure’s arms and legs are crossed, and though the curving pipe seems to both frame him and assert a heavy, threatening solidity, his vital smile gives him a hint of freedom. It’s also significant that another pipe can be seen in the background: Shulzhenko surrounds his figures with the material aspects of their particular cultural landscape, not metaphorical representations of the human condition. It is in part because Russian buildings are crumbling and Russian vacant lots are strewn with refuse, he seems to say, that Russians can’t be fully free.
Work in nearby galleries reminded me of similar ways in which painters make their art vital. The splotchy, variegated surfaces of Gaela Erwin’s self-portraits at Lyons Weir recall Shulzhenko, if only distantly. In Self-portrait as a Bride, the light and dark portions of her face don’t flow together smoothly but remain separate, like different battlefields. One area seems redder than most skin; another is more white. Her collarbone protrudes, an uneasy reminder of her physicality; indeed, in all these paintings she seems uncomfortable with her physicality. As in Shulzhenko’s work, skin often seems less a window on the soul than mere stuff, a substance as inert as clothing; indeed, the lace in Self-portrait as a Bride seems potentially more spiritual than her face. Juxtaposing areas of paint with one another and paint as illusion with paint as paint, Erwin produces a formal drama that illuminates her complex self-images.
