Victor G. Kalinin. "Between silence and speech"

At the invitation of the Radishchevsky Museum and the Volga branch of the Russian Academy of Arts, with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Saratov Region, First Vice-President, Academician of the Russian Academy of Arts, Honored Artist of Russia Viktor Kalinin presents in Saratov the author’s project “Between Silence and Speech”.

The exhibition is on display from March 1 to April 7, 2019 in the Saratov State Art Museum named after A.N. Radishchev (building on the street Radishchev, 39).

The exhibition presents more than 50 works by Viktor Kalinin, created over a 50-year period of creative activity: from the second half of the 60s to the present. Four paintings by Kalinin were acquired by the Russian Ministry of Culture back in the 70s and transferred to the collection of the Radishchev Museum (one of them is in the permanent exhibition of the Engels Art Gallery, a branch of the State Agricultural Art Museum). Saratovites will be able to see paintings from different creative cycles: “Guests”, “Parental Saturday”, “Procession”, “Call of Athos”, etc.

Victor Kalinin was born in 1946 in the village of Zalesovo in Altai. Lives and works in Moscow. Academician of the Russian Academy of Arts (painting department), First Vice-President of the Russian Academy of Arts (since 2017), member of the Moscow Union of Artists, member of the board of the Partnership of Moscow Arts, member of the Creative Union of Artists of Russia, member of the Moscow Union of Writers.

The paintings of Victor Kalinin literally from his first steps in art aroused keen interest among the audience and became the subject of close attention and analysis from the leading art historians of our country.

Altai art historian, academician of the Russian Academy of Arts Mikhail Shishin rightly asserts that as an artist, Kalinin was largely formed thanks to the special creative atmosphere of the 60s: his studies at the Moscow Art School (B. Stroganovskoye) in the workshop of the professor, academician of the Russian Academy of Arts, and the outstanding painter Geli Korzhev had a beneficial effect.

The main reason for resilience and creative identity is the strong Old Believer, Siberian roots. And the genius of the Kalinin family, who endowed all his relatives with devotion and rooting in his native land, an innate moral feeling and artistic gift. Homeland, home, close and dear people - this is an inescapable source of themes in the work of Kalinin. And this is no coincidence. The artist clearly sees how life lines are realized in his family, which achieve distinctness before his eyes. The artist’s grandfather was not only a priest, but also an icon painter. He became a living legend and spiritual pillar of the family, the embodiment of a truly Christian ascetic ministry, who suffered martyrdom during the years of the Civil War. And it is precisely this, breaking through the darkness, that he appears in the picture of his grandson ("Portrait of Archpriest Timofei Klyucherov).

The artist’s father is a warrior who went through the heat of the First and Second World Wars, and at the same time a hard worker who does not know idleness. The father is many-stage in the paintings of Kalinin, including appearing as a religious philosopher in the work “The Father Reading the Bible”. The strongest image, which caused a lot of responses - to those, and they paved the way, including to the images of the elders from Athos.

In the hard times of religious pogroms, a book about the Holy Mount Athos was miraculously preserved in the family. Mother told the six-year-old son about the holy places, showed in the pictures where pilgrims were sailing. There were still spiritual verses-chants that mother sang before bedtime. The melody was related to the light, penetrated into the soul, erased the boundaries of objects, everything around became this light-melody. Fifty years later, Viktor Kalinin himself will come to the holy places of Mount Athos, and in 1995 he will write his first painting, "Athos."

From why the threshold to Mount Athos lay the invisible, but strong spiritual axis of Victor Kalinin. In his paintings, he constantly tries to make it obvious. In the painting “Mother” (1968), a small children’s figure appears in the doorway of the parental home - the artist’s first symbolic self-portrait. The timid steps of the child are overshadowed by the figure of the mother in the image of the Intercessor. It is as if she blesses her son from the first foundation of the spiritual bridge - the threshold of the house - to life, to another foundation - Athos. So lay the horizontal linking everything in the art of Victor Kalinin. But there is a vertical.

The artist himself, setting out the philosophy of his work, will write: "At first there was a sharp sense of horizontal and vertical, a sense of inviolability and integrity of the volume." Where does this vertical come from?

The movement from the longitudinal to the mountain was in every mother’s prayer song. Longer is earthly, dense and material, and wind, heaven, Light is higher. Retrospectively looking at Kalinin’s works, you can accurately capture the main vector of his art: the distribution of objects will increase in color, composition, texture, images, contours will be lost. Forms retain only as much similarity with the earthly projection as is necessary to identify them with their eyes. Accordingly, the picture, regardless of the plot, becomes a thickening, a single color spot of different densities. The background, in turn, is part of the great Inexpressible, which stores everything in itself, and the artist extracts from it the necessary and due at the moment. Kalinin formulates the relationship between background and image in his theoretical work, which opens up good prospects for understanding the semantics of his work: “A strong, indestructible background gives its qualities those phenomena that it gave rise to.” And this leads to a special concept of compositional solution of paintings by Victor Kalinin. (Based on the article by M. Yu. Shishin “Athos in the fate and art of Victor Kalinin.” - M. 2016).

Oleg Krivtsun, a Moscow art historian, academician, and Doctor of Philosophy, defined Kalinin’s style of writing as “open-form painting”: “Victor Kalinin speaks a unique pictorial language; at exhibitions, you can recognize his letter from afar. In the artist’s paintings - a rebellion of colors and lines dissecting them. This “fused fragmentary” image, a peculiar collage, a mosaic of color overlays became Kalinin’s trademark. Perhaps the “Portrait of Vollard” by Picasso or the faces of the Vrubel angel and demons are the progenitors of the style of our author. The picturesque abundance in combination with the moving composition creates the melodiousness of his paintings. The saturated background, where vertical, horizontal, diagonal strokes, expressive color contrasts struggle, all this creates a feeling of visual tension, elastic dynamics of the canvas. The space of painting is fragmented, but at the same time - and maintains unity.

From this crowd of colors, the struggle between yellow and black, blue and brown, mirages of image suddenly form. The artist knows how to stop in time, which gives rise to the effect of the “open form”, enables the born image to remain alive, hesitant, to preserve internal energy. The paints remain to play among themselves, call each other, squeeze, swum, crawl, swell, illuminate, and tint the mobile diversity of the image. The feeling of openness of the picture turns the lines of perception to infinity, and what could be more valuable for a work of art than its inexhaustibility! ”

The exposition of Viktor Kalinin’s personal exhibition at the Radishchev Museum presents works of different years - from the earliest ones created in the late 60s to those already written today. But they are united by some higher order, which determines rhythm and a kind of harmony. Speaking high syllable O.A. Krivtsun, creative “Victor Kalinin’s letter is a demiurgical exaltation of painting: decisive, strong-willed, marked by the promise of great inner conviction”.

For reference: in Russia and abroad, more than 20 personal exhibitions of Victor Kalinin took place, including in the State Russian Museum (2010), the Central House of Artists (Moscow, 2012). Participant in group exhibitions in more than 30 countries, including the UK, Germany, Denmark, Spain, USA, France, Switzerland, Japan. Member of international art symposia and art salons in Europe and the USA.