Vladimir Logutov «Fire Run»
UNIT 3 Project Space, Empson Street, London E3 3LT
Dates: 24 April – 4 May 2025
The exhibition «Fire Run» includes creations of the series “No path through the flames”. Vladimir Logutov started working at it two years ago. Developing the metaphor enclosed in the title (a citation of a song by Egor Letov) the artist makes the element of fire hos protagonist. Fires are raging everywhere here. On the contrast with the depth of the dark background, expressive brushstrokes in the foreground create effects of air, smoke, heat, and ash. The painterly masses swirl, casting protuberances, sometimes dissipating into dust, sometimes flaring like lightning strikes. The color scheme, reduced to sterile contrasts of black, white, and gray, sometimes cools to smoldering, sometimes glows like plasma, simulating the effect of overexposed photography. The subjects remain a mystery, as does the quality in which these works should be regarded and attributed. Is there a monochrome photography translated into painting? Minimalist abstraction? A new version of Symbolism? In recent years, Logutov has changed almost everything in his life and work, but the key question: “what exactly do we see in front of us?” remains the focus of his practice.
The interest in the elemental nature of mimesis and random factors in the creative process defined the range of tasks Logutov posed from the very beginning of his career. His series “Defective” and “Negative Drawing” (2007), as well as “Verticals” (2008), were based on the subtle orchestration of unforeseen deviations: the arbitrary trajectory of a paint drip, peeling fragments of canvas, or strokes left by a pencil when it is not in use. A significant role plays the fact that the artist’s frequent references to the theme of vague, unclarified states of consciousness, in which a clear and unambiguous perception of reality is somehow hindered. Such is the programmatic video “Twilight” (2005), dedicated to micro-glitches in the everyday urban environment, or the video cycle “Structured Spaces” (2011), in which the blank noise of the screen is superimposed on the landscape like blind spots of vision.
From the series “No path through the flames”, 2023-2024. Acrylic on canvas. 200 cm. X 220 cm.
Thanks to the imitation tactics the artist chooses, the images he creates possess a fundamental multiplicity of modes of perception, flickering in oppositions of “realistic/non-realistic,” “objective/non-objective,” and “accidental/intentional.” Nevertheless, such multidimensionality guarantees that the reception of Logutov’s works will continually be enriched and expanded, similar to Mikhail Matyushin’s practices of “expanded viewing.”
“No path through the flames” propels this multi-mode to the next level. The first works of the series created in 2023 already earliest images like branches, rhizomes or needles, but at the same time they indistinguishable from the expressive brushstrokes of Pollock’s dripping technique. Upon that AI technologies are also recognizable behind their cobwebs. Forced to constantly switch between the natural, the painted, and the machine-like, the viewer cannot escape the paradoxical sensation of inhuman coldness and sensual passion in the same image.
Mistrust of the visible, which previously served as Logutov’s premise for critical analysis of imagery in the time of hyperconsumption, has acquired new grounds in recent years, emerging as a consequence of the a-rational, frustrating nature of the modern world, hyper-complex and hyper-conflictual. This is a catastrophic world, to which one can only bear witness, and any questioning is merely a rhetorical invitation to participation, an attempt to share a common experience. And whereas the artist previously spoke to the viewer in the cold, detached language of formalist techniques, from which all personal elements were consistently expelled, now his art clearly conveys individual sensory experience and personal drama. The shared drama of the twenties — anxiety, tension, fear — materialize in the form of the primordial element, whose choice the artist spelled out in a personal conversation: “now is the time of fire.”
From the series “No path through the flames”, 2024. Acrylic on canvas. 200 cm. X 230 cm.
…One of the key paintings in the series: a black square of starless night, impenetrable to the eye. The depth of the background darkness is broken down by a procession of distant lights. It divides the image by an invisible horizon and suggests that we are looking at a landscape. Its center is a bonfire, resembling a forest fire. It is clearly seen from a distance; as if from a train window, (two light streaks in the background resemble reflections of the train car’s neon lights in glass, as invisible as the viewer). However, perhaps an imaginary observer is viewing from a higher ground. And then a new horizon appears before him; the two streaks now appear like other, distant fires, the scale of which can only be horrified by speculation. Peering into the faded texture of the smoky masses, whose ashen hues are rendered with almost hyperrealistic verisimilitude, one forgets that the painting is monochrome.
Gaston Bachelard, by poetic interpretation of the laws of vivid imagination, emphasized on the lack of stable forms in the elements and their byproducts: “Ashes, dust, silt, smoke produce images with a continuously changing substance” (1). Fire is synonymous with becoming, that is, essentially, with creativity itself: “To repeat that fire is an element means <…> to think of substance in its production, in its generation” (2). Flame, smoke, or water, unique at every moment, draw the viewer into a state of hypnotic enchantment, which, according to Bachelard, is the beginning of thought and fantasy.
Leaving aside all the metaphysic, Logutov resonates with the French thinker in a key respect: the capacity for the endless generation of abstract visual structures, possessed by natural processes such as liquid flows, explosions, combustion, and atmospheric phenomena (as well as AI), stimulates perceptual algorithms for identifying and recognizing non-objective patterns. Alongside the painting, the “Fire Run” exhibition featured a video in which close-ups of a burning fire were symmetrically divaricated, with one-half of the screen serving as a mirror image of the opposite. The whole image transformed into an abstract kaleidoscope, a “fountain” of unique slices of natural processuality, like Rorschach inkblots. Revealing the range of viewer perception from almost anthropomorphic associations to completely non-objective ones, the video vividly demonstrates the artist’s method of working with images.
However, as far as different figures an engaged viewer noticed in the dynamic play of the elements, their phantom nature is obvious. Not a single image in the series can be fully “vouched” for in terms of its subject matter. In reality, all of them point to autonomous abstract structures, behind which lies uncertainty by itself and the fears it generates. Mikhail Yampolsky points at the uncertainty as a fundamental feature of modernity, conceptualizing its reflection in the subject—by analogy with Hegel, who in his Jena lectures compared the man with the night, an empty nothingness, containing in unmanifested form the entire wealth of infinitely no end representations (3).
From the series “No path through the flames”, 2024. Acrylic on canvas. 200 cm. X 300 cm.
The author himself describes, “No path through the flames” as a capturing the mood of the time of change, when “reality loses coherence, when history has not yet solidified into narrative, and perception flickers in a state of heightened fragility”. We dare to suggest that, in constructing this “excessive fragility of perception,” Logutov borrows not only the techniques but also the very pathos of American Abstract Expressionism, embracing its fundamental idea of the heroic individuality of the artist, whose agonizing quest for self-knowledge is expressed in a painting technique based on the “opposing consecutions of chaos and order.” (4). The artist persists in giving a new meaning to this conflict by pictural means in the spirit of the current moment, as something that could be called “dark expressionism” (by analogy with “dark ontology” or dark metal rock), which deals with elemental imagery, phantasmagoric and irrational. Logutov modifies the substantive impulse established by the post-war New York school with the full power of his arsenal of the latest means of visual production. In his author’s commentary on the series, he emphasizes: “the testimony is not illustrative — it is visceral,” thereby echoing Harold Rosenberg, who wrote in the 1950s about the replacement of illustration with action, which becomes an object legitimized by the artist’s personal mythology(5). This turning of the author’s vector from anonymous analytical utterance to the immediacy of material testimony in the form of a stern, expressive gesture may demonstrate the conception of the inseparability of the artist’s private existence from the pictorial medium newly emerging relevance in contemporary Russian art. Moreover, the medium that is not understood in its autonomous, hermetic integrity, but on the contrary, as a conduit for a collective multitude of social “voices.”
David Joselit, in his analysis of the post-war abstraction, ponders how to make the artist’s internal “mental topography” to be an expression of a wider cultural reality, the very nature of modernity in a form that can be expressed through painting? (6) Abstract Expressionists, seeking to reflect the individual as the universal, turned to archetypes and myths at early stage of their creative evolution, as well as to pure patterns of perception at their advanced stages. But it’s possible that the most universal and enduring principle they discovered was Barnett Newman’s description, on the analogy of the Native American art, perception of abstract shape as “a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable”(7).
From the series “No path through the flames”, 2024. Acrylic on canvas. 200 cm. X 120 cm.
It is possible to be this fear of the unknown at the current stage of history, resonating with its intuitive sense among contemporaries, becoming the reason for new appeals to the formless, fluid nature of painting, in which the individual and collective sense of the world as a set of unresolved conflicts merge in a dark and vague affect. Anatoly Rykov called such an artistic ideal the “truth” or “realism” of the avant-garde, which has acquired new relevance in contemporary art as “very late Romanticism,” whose subject matter is the “blind spots” of consciousness and the “black holes” of the universe, something that defies rationalization and “reforming” (8). This feeling is a kind of equivalent of revelation, a “pure experience” not articulated in “direct statements” compromised symbolically and ideologically. It seeks a non-linear form, unburdened by the philosophical desire to explain the reality, but allowing one to experience its dramatic depth internally.
NOTES:
1 Bachelard, G. Water and Dreams. An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Moscow: Izdatelstvo gumanitar’noy literatury, 1998. P. 157.
2 Bachelard, G. Psychoanalysis of Fire. Moscow: Gnosis, 1993. P. 70.
3 See: Yampolsky, M. Image. Lecture Course. Moscow: Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye, 2024. Pp. 328–329.
4 Joselit, D. American Art Since 1945. Moscow: Ad Marginem Press, 2024. P. 23.
5 See: Rosenberg, G. American Artists of Action // Rosenberg, G. The Tradition of the New. Moscow: V-A-C Press, 2019. Pp. 36–44.
6 See: Joselit, D. American Art Since 1945. P. 16–18.
7 Newman B. The Ideographic picture // Art in theory. 1900–1990. An anthology of changing ideas. 1992. P. 566.
8 Rykov A. Politics of the Avant-garde. Moscow: New Literary Review, 2019. P. 71–73.
Konstantin Zatsepin
Born in 1980 in Samara. Cand.Sc. of Theory of Literature. Theorist of the contemporary art, mentor, artist.
