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 To enter in the fantasy world of
russian
artist Constantine Kansky is to enter in the fairy tale that takes
you from the ordinary life to the ideal land like Earthsea of Ursula
LeGuin. That land exists somewhere near ours as the parallel reality
that in mystic and subtle way appears in dreams and reveries. There
are no cars and skyscrapers, TV and atom electric stations, violence
and wars, homeless and "new russians". There the hot cold autumn
tenderly turns into the warm summer winter.
Everything is fantastic in Kansky's art - landscapes with the Gothic
houses on the ledges of the rocks, on the island or in the wild
forest, genre scenes with the strange persons in wide-brim
sharp-pointed hats and in medieval carnival clothes. The artist
creates his own iconography. Kings, jesters, flying musicians,
traveling actors, pioneers, sorcerers and beautiful ladies,
philosophizing pilgrims occupy the space of his paintings, travel
from one picture to another, creating the strange game of meanings,
allegories and symbols.
The creative work of Kansky is a kind of the plastic equivalent to
the fantasy in the literature. Fantasy and reality, binding
together, create the strange and enigmatic world turning to the
mythological past, the Golden Age, when the man doesn't distinguish
himself from the realm of Nature and live with it in love, harmony
and consent. There the tree turns to be the house, the house turns
to be the rock, people knit with the land, water, mountains and the
images become the plastic metaphors.
The surrealistic elements tend to the doubling of the images - the
man's face may look like the dog's muzzle ("Pug-Dog", 1996), the
strange flowers grow through the hats ("Beyond Orthodoxy", 1997);
the houses grow from the rocks ("Low Tide", 1999).
The creative work of Kansky is another proof that the world is still
living by the dream. He creates the image of the land where you want
to live. You can see how the boats are gliding by the always calm
seas and how the carnival persons leave them and start to fish or to
play on the flutes, violins or strange guitars. There the boy with
the wise book on his knees and the goose pen in his hand is sitting
on the awfully big for him Vienna chair and waiting for the ripening
of the huge fruit that reminds the apple on the Tree of the
Knowledge ("Time of Ripening", 2001).
Two men - one is short, old and bald with the basket full of juicy
apples on his back, the other - tall young dreamer with the empty
bucket and the fishing rod on his shoulder. Who will be chosen by
the country beauty? ("The Temptation of Peasants", 2000).
Kansky deliberately exaggerates and hyperbolizes the images
("Bumbling Evil Maker", 2001), the other works are read as grotesque
("Golden Loop", 2000; "Bought Music", 2000). His creatures are funny
sometimes, but they are always kind (even the Evil Maker) and they
are not dreadful.
The artist creates the earthy, not ascetic but still
virginally-poetical images. He understands male and female
principles not in erotically-sensual form but as a manifestation of
chivalrous high ideals.
This world is without anthropomorphic center, there the being of the
man is according to the life of the flowers, trees, streams -
everything is in the process of the eternal blossoming, ripening,
changing. He constructs in association the archetypes of the
mythological mind, grieving for the Golden age. The man is not the
center of the Universe, but he is the World - one of the numerous.
Kansky's pantheistically patriarchal idyll gets in the paradigm of
the romantic retro-styles expressing the post-modernistic tends to
the return of the past traditions and using the experience of the
European masters of the XVI-XIX centuries.
Kansky is closed to the painting to the North Renaissance by the
techniques and image system with allegories, parables, but without
spiritualistic religious essence. His investigation in the field of
composition is the deliberate escape from the reflection of the
visible space, expressed with the help of the "scientific Italian
perspective". Space created by the artist is imaginary, artificial,
and phantasmagoric. In some works he underlines the plane in
non-deep perspective, in others he uses sharp perspective
reductions, in another case the figures or buildings of the
background are much bigger those in the front. Often we see the
different scales of the human figures or the things (according to
the degree of the significance). The King and the Queen detouring
their possessions are much bigger than the small houses where their
subjects live ("Casuistical Promenade", 1997).
Kansky understands tradition as a touch to the origin, to the
pra-image born by the myth, to the higher essence - "Absolute" which
cannot be expressed by the words but can be only approached with the
help of intuition and contemplation. In that case the creative
activity is the pray in silence and in rejection from everything
ordinary, social, psychological that turn the great to the banality.
Three hypostases - rhythm, line and color - are participating in
that liturgy of the pra-forms on which the linear-plastic action is
based. The more open is the color the more is the degree of its
emotional influence and the symbolic line is easier to read. The
artist uses the broad specter of the colorist search: from the
tender warm brown color to the decorative color -bright, contrast,
hot or cold. On the scumbling tradition of the old masters he
imposes the experience of the painting of the XX century modernists
that do not afraid of the local colors.
Standing on the edge of the XXI century Kansky manages to summarize
the experience of the past ages joining them with the innovations of
the XX century. He brings to the Art Temple his parody grotesque
art, his way of thinking and esthetic program.
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