OCTOBER 2007

THE ARTIST MIKHAIL CHEMIAKIN
www.stria.ca

Deprived voluntarily of his colours, the painter limits himself to the drawing and this drawing is never a study for future works.

What are these drawings? One ought to say that we are dealing with the diary of a hand. This hand takes no orders from anyone, and probably it does not even obey in a precise way the brain that guides it, for it, too, can even venture to guide the brain.






The brain encouraged by the hand to wake up, as soon as it is effectively awakes, it prevents the hand from behaving rakishly. It takes charge of what the hand offers it in semi-blindness. Where does irresponsibility end and where does full responsibility start? To this possible question, I would like to answer: Chemiakin never improvises but in the fullest intellectual responsibility, which by no means signifies that he refuses improvisation.

When the orders come from the motion rather than from the concept, an itinerary must be given to it and the drawing might look like the tracings of a seismograph or like a cardiogram. All of a sudden, the nature pf the drawing changes and from the abstract and it becomes concrete. A kind of wandering of the hand - one might think - enamored of its curves and dawdlings? But it takes hold of itself: the drawing ends up as a walrus, or a seal or a dog stranded on a beach: the formless becomes embodied.



The drawing can be a signature: ceasing to be a go-between, the hand states its identity. Let it be free to present nothing but its own existence, its inalienable rhythm, its physical attributes through which it is unlike any other hand in the world. It proclaims for itself the right to become - for once - an end and a limit. The hand does not represent and presents nothing. It signs.

Where the cosmos meets psychology and psychoanalysis, improvisation rekindles the most audacious thought. Mood after mood wrestles with the universe, the culture, the capture of invention. Chemiakin does not have one single way to apprehend the real or the imaginary, the human or the divine, but all the ways simultaineously to make us aware - fabulous, analytical, happy, tormented Chemiakin.

Memories of Childhood by Chemiakin


Rebekka with Mask by Chemiakin


I like Mihail Chemiakin's art. I saw his pictures for the first time in 1967 at an exhibition in the hall of the Leningrad conservatoire. They were bright, richly coloured canvases, mainly oil-paintings. I saw with what interest and greediness the students of the conservatoire were "eating up" Chemiakin's pictures. I took with me to Moscow photographs of Chemiakin's illustrations of Dostoievsky. They were pencil drawings

At a later stage in Moscow, I can't say how often I looked at these drawings, time and again, in order to revive them in my memory to the minutest detail. Already then I had understood the "musicality" of the painter's hand.

That was the very reason which led me to ask Chemiakin to do the cover of the records of Tchaikovsky's opera "The Queen of Spades" which I had just finished recording in Paris. I knew that Chemiakin was capable of "scoring" the old Petersbourg in his drawing. And his cover started sounding for me with the illusive colours of Petersbourg when you can't figure out whether it is a sunrise or a sunset in the cold and transparent radiance of the somewhat lifeless skies. It is light failing on objects and people which makes them silvery and elusive.

Mstislav Rostropovitch
1978 ParisUntitled