Mikail Shikhanov-Kublitsky

belongs to that new wave of Russian painters whose philosophy and aesthetic guidelines were formed at the juncture of historical epochs,

actually, at the turn of the twenty-first century. Luckily, that generation of artists happened to avoid the artistic doctrine of socialist realism. The «masters of the millennium’ manage to stay away from the notorious «social themes» of the Soviet times and

escape political engagement that manifested itself so actively in the art of the 1990s.

The «artists of the millennium» focus their attention and effort on developing the culture of fine arts — painting, drawing and sculpture. Like European masters of the early twentieth century, they tend to shift the emphasis from the content to the form and keep declaring that the importance of a work of art does not depend on the theme and subject but rather on the originality of the composition and new ideas in colour, light and plastic shaping.

Mikhail Shikhanov-Kublitsky’s is a brilliant example of that kind of work.

The paintings of the 30-year-old artist look original, expressive, marked with highly textured surface, clear-cut, sure intonations and colouristic individuality.

‌Shikhanov-Kublitsky was very quick at finding in art what takes his colleagues long years to find his individuality, his own style.

The master paints most of his pictures with a palette knife, not with a brush, using thick oils, undiluted with a solvent. While painting, the artist makes up the necessary colour shades straight on the canvas or paperboard without mixing paints on the palette first. His thick, impasto painting is reminiscent of encaustic, where the paint is embedded in wax, the technique widely used in the Classical Antiquity.

Professionally, Shikhanov-Kublitsky is very versatile. To his colleagues he is better known for his monumental work such as wall painting of Orthodox churches in Russia and Serbia, experiments in design and architecture.

As for easel painting, he favours traditional genres of landscape, still-life and portraiture. He is especially good at painting vedute, highly detailed cityscapes. Our hero was born and brought up in town. His character and mentality are those of an urban-minded person, who admires the light of neon lamps, the vistas and labyrinths of streets, the arcs of bridges, silhouettes of many-storey buildings, churches and factory chimneys. For him, life is unthinkable without the roar of engines,

the beat and the rhymes of the rap coming from loudspeakers, the rattle of printers or ringing of cell-phones. Town is his habitat, the place where one can most quickly and

perfectly, with maximum energy, realise one’s dreams, ambitions and talents. That is why the sentimental and lyrical motifs of the canvases painted by rural life painters seem to him childishly naive and old-fashioned.

Man is really happy, the master says, when he can communicate with people of his kind. Town is the place that brings together the cleverest, most gifted and beautiful people whose activities determine the direction and level of the development of civilisation.

Portraits of those town people, men and women, can be found at all per-

onal exhibitions of Shikhanov-Kublitsky.

As a sociable man of artistic temperament and good sense of humour, Shikhanov-Kublitsky cannot imagine himself out of the urban environment or urban social life.

He understands very well that under the present-day circumstances one can materialize some large-scale creative ideas only with the help of assistants and people who share your viewers. That is why the master is looking for and finds contacts with representatives of municipal governments, the cultural elite, the Church and the Business.

Simultaneously, his creative activities tend to prove that an artist, as a Godgifted talent, is not to implement somebody’s volition or desire. He constantly reminds his opponents that the artist’s job by creating a new world, new aesthetics is similar to that of Demiurge who fashioned the material World of Chaos and divided the Light from Darkness. His job, he claims, is at the peak of the pyramid of human skills and

knowledge and is more important than any other profession associated with science, politics or religion.

Today’s artist, as Shikhanov-Kublitsky understands it, is not a self-obsessed

philosopher but an active transformer of life. The objective of such an artist is to create new reality and new habitat. That is why the master does not refer the concept

of harmony, so much favoured by the masters of the past, to the static meditative ideas of «silence» and

«calm» but to energetic, creative ones, closely associated with a union

of homo sapience with the existing environment.

As for the existing environment, it shows itself, Shikhanov-Kublitsky thinks, in endless change of shapes, flicker of faces, flashes of light and play of colours. Inside the historic, century-old towns, the dialogue between the current, momentary and passing, on the one side, and the long-term, unchanging and constant, on the other, is built on the contrast of moving, ever changing figures and groups of people and the clearly cut against the background of the sky unmoving and static silhouettes of architectural constructions — houses, palaces and churches. Artistic

reflection of that dialogue shaped in different intonation — lyrical, dramatic, epical, becomes the dominant of Shikhanov-Kublitsky’s cityscapes.

Architecture in those cityscapes is more than beautiful. It is metaphysical. Classical ensembles of Rome, Venice, Moscow and St Petersburg impress with their formal, ceremonial and unshakable grandeur, with some out-of-time steadiness. The buildings look animated and completely self-sufficient.

Every ensemble, every monument pained by Shikhanov-Kublitsky has its own aura, its voice, its character shaped by the time. The humans at the background of those monumental Colossuses look like bustling faceless shades doomed to pass in oblivion.