International Artists Promotion Group

THE “RUSSIAN ART & PARIS” INTRODUCING:   

I have never regretted becoming an artist and I’m not ashamed of my profession. However, I was never able to accept what I do for just a profession – it is really something else. I started like everyone else with a simple desire to learn to draw. I, like many, am familiar with the inexplicable excitement, arising from the sense of how fathomless art is. In the village where I was born and grew up, there was no art studio or art school, so I came to everything myself. I was euphoric from the smell of oil paints and the smell of rare art albums. Instead of cubes and pyramids I drew and painted as best as I could all that surrounded me – portraits of family, household utensils, rooks and our river. I never thought about professionalism as a criterion for evaluation. Professionalism – is good … and I agree that it is better with than without it, but in his own depths an artist should remain an amateur, without this his professionalism is dead
•  It so happened that in my “training” life there were no “teachers”. That is, those who would directly teach you to see and think. There were favorite artists, which I gradually revealed and studied from. In my early years I was truly mesmerized by Mikhail Vrubel and later Viktor Popkov. If we talk about tastes and influences, it is necessary to talk about art in general. The first film by Tarkovsky’s that I watched was “Solaris”. I can find no words to describe it other than shock. I did not know anything about the director, and not much about the film, but I still remember the state I was in – the state of surprise when everything in me was turned upside down. A similar reaction happened from contact with Brodsky’s poetry, literally from the first poem. List of “spiritual brothers” can be very long, but lets come back to Andrei Tarkovsky. Specifically him, I can call my “teacher”, because the impact of his work was more than substantial and greatly influenced my thinking.
•  I can not say that I consider myself to be a fully established artist. I am more concerned about myself tomorrow – rather than myself today or yesterday. I really love my job and can no longer imagine myself without creative work. I love the creative process itself. Especially the middle part of it, when you already pushed away from the initial concept and the work itself begins to make adjustments and lead you to the final version. That is, in the end you always get something a little bit different, a little bit more. Therefore, I treat creative work like a miracle. In that which I paint or am about to paint, I first of all see a phenomena. Phenomenon-Bread, Phenomenon-Boat, Phenomenon-Air, Phenomenon-wind and so on. In general, it is always difficult for an artist, and there is no point in explaining your work. Art, like music, acts on the subconscious almost instantly – enjoy it or not, touches or not …

Mikhail Kaban-Petrov for the readers of the ”Russian Art & Paris”.

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In painting “everything is on the degree
of disappearance of reality and the return to it.”

Yuri Norshtein

The nature of the art language of painting is non-verbal, if a picture can be described in words, it’s a bad picture. Describing the artwork of artist Mikhail Kaban-Petrov just does not make sense. Being extremely concise by form, they involve the viewer in an unrestrained flow of associations, allusions, metaphors, and intersections with other worlds of the arts. The author understands his work as realism, the objective world is an unshakable plot-thematic pillar of his works. However, the moving motive of his artwork is not an image, but an expression of deep, multifaceted, ambiguous, performed contradictions of human experiences.
•  The inevitability of conflict between matter and spirit conveys an intense drama with a visible absence of action. In the works of Mikhail Kaban-Petrov there is created a space of experiences, the artwork of feelings and even passions. A dry leaf, an apple, a boat, a road is present as an object of an image and reflection. The foundation of the paintings’ plot is the arrival of objects in space and time. Time may flow differently in the artworks. Series of works “Solid” (2011) – about the asphalt under the wheels of a moving car. Still life “Heat” (2011) viscous long midday slumber. Still life, “The Glove” (2011) on how stepping over a puddle, you notice that someone dropped it.
•  The artist bravely operates with space, sometimes shrinking it to the size of a canvas, sometimes expanding a microcosm to the same size. The space-time continuum is constructed in a cycle of artworks. Cycles “Boards” (2011), “Russian theme” (2011) touch upon the acute problems of the modern world-view, the experiences of changes to the world picture, coupled with inevitable losses and the inescapable desire to avoid them. Both cycles are combined by a cross-cutting theme – the image of apples on the table, and a distinctive color and compositional “rhyming”, a continuous rhythmic organization of the picture’s planes.
•  In the 1970’s, visual arts came in close contact with cinematograpy. Cinema at this time acquires its artist, who begins to build each frame and their film series under the laws of easel artwork, making them the subject of contemplation. For a long time painting was in a search of ways to transfer motion and other intrinsic techniques of action. However visual arts have one decisive advantage – it commands silence. Remember – “the greater a pause – the greater an actor.” Artwork is a pause in time and space. Artist Mikhail Kaban-Petrov is mastering this amazingly effective technique, he holds the pause, giving the viewer a chance in the silence of art to realize something important and forever existent.

by Irina Marsheva, art critic,
member of the Union of Artists of the Russian Federation.

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Pictures in the text:
“Heat”  Oil on canvas,  (110 x 120 cm)

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“Russian theme” (Prayer)  Oil on Canvas. (133 x 90 cm)

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The complexity of the assessments and the perceptions of contemporary art are in many ways linked to the orientation of the audience and the critics towards the generally accepted canons and artistic trends. The grading scale is thus attached to the present from the past. Roughly speaking, the definition of “what should be,” is willingly or unwillingly built on the assumption of “what was”. It would be interesting to ask art critics about how they see the future of fine art? And is it possible to also get an assessment of modern art based on the criteria of the future, not the past? The very question seems rhetorical at first glance – the example of empty cells in the periodic table is probably known to everyone. What is getting in the way? Perhaps there is a well-established view of art in society as one of the varieties of the service sector, which implies adherence to the aesthetics of today. This is not true. Fine art does not engage in the servicing of aesthetic needs. Its purpose and scope are in a completely different field. As an illustration, let’s take a look at the work of one of the modern masters.
•  In the upside down world of the painter Mikhail Kaban-Petrov, everything is very similar to the truth. The inverted boat that will not float because of winter (“Boat”). And will the thawing ever come, and with it the pure water on which you can float, no one knows. Perhaps the thawing will never occur and the boat will not float ever. Is that not true? A door, remarkable in that it is closed (“Door”). Light makes its way under the door – there is someone, there are people, there is life, there people are “… again, not sleeping. Maybe drinking wine, maybe sitting around.“ (M.Tsvetayeva). But we, the audience, and the artist himself, are on this side of the door. Will we be able to get to where thelight is? Maybe yes, maybe no. “Heat,” where there are two people noticeably present, although neither are in the plane of the image; and from the outside world there only remains a red-hot streak of light making its way out of a curtained window. There is no life, only the emptiness of heat. The life in here, in this room, and what we see, is but a fragment. A fragment reinterpreted in the artistic space of a canvas. What kind of artwork is this? What is its essence? First of all in this remarkable truth, is a feature invaluable to art – uniqueness, as the Parthenon is unique, despite the abundance of marble.
•  The artwork of M. Kaban-Petrov is far from symbolism, it contains no simple set of metaphors. The nature of this painting is deeply national – there is more Dionisy in these canvases than Cezanne. The style of paintings by M. Kaban-Petrov is associated with black and white “graphics” of the novels by Dostoevsky. “Requiem”, is made in a “negativity” form that is very unexpected for an artistic painting. “Prayer”, with a tragic red color and the no less tragic “The Wall”, show an inner spiritual relationship with the major themes of Dostoevsky.
•  The realism of the perception of the surrounding world, the understanding of the world as an objective reality, is materialized in the artistic reflections on the content and meaning of this reality. What we see in artworks of Mikhail Kaban-Petrov, is not just a glance from the side at our present reality, but a glance at it from a different time. A glimpse from the future. This is how our time will look, the part of it that went into the field of view of the artist, through the eyes of future generations of viewers (and joining them, art critics).  ©