Метаморфозы Рудольфа Хачатряна Metamorphoses of Rudolf Khatchatrian

METAMORPHOSES OF RUDOLF KHACHATRYAN

The Sobi Concern organized three celebrations in Moscow: a concert by Mstislav Rostropovich with the National Symphony Orchestra of the United States on Red Square, and a concert by Maya Plisetskaya at the Bolshoi Theatre. The third was Rudolf Khachatryan’s retrospective exhibition at the Central House of Artists. Such is the level set. And here you are, and here he is — Rudolf Khachatryan, a many-faced master woven of intense, unstoppable labor and illumination, a worker who has reached the creation of a world of his own. You have been invited to share in the attainment of beauty and God, in a tragic sense of the world and in love, in eternity and in the movement of time. What is presented is immense — not only in the number of levkas works and cardboards. Your encounter with its content will demand serious emotional and spiritual effort; and quiet, pure joy will not always be your only companion. Fatigue is possible too, as after a long journey. You will not be able to explain everything to yourself in words. The images will remain with you. Something unnamed, perhaps, will take root within you. And perhaps you will feel that you have changed. A conversation with the artist does not make the path easier, but it prolongs it.

I want to begin not with the first questions, but with the last. Today, after two heart attacks, after the opening of this gigantic exhibition and after some kind of life threshold, what do you think is the most important thing for a person on earth?

“Faith in God. I have always thought so, and I think so now. Not somewhere out there — He is everywhere, and one must see Him in oneself. It so happened that when I was thirteen, I saw God while awake.”

“Can you tell how it happened?”

“It is a long story.”

“We have time.”

“In Yerevan we lived in a tiny room — if you remember the drawing with the stove…”

“I remember, next to the drawing of that wonderful shoe.”

“Yes. I lived with my father, mother, and brother on the ground floor, with one little window. When it was closed, there was simply darkness in our room. And when the light was turned off, complete darkness. I was asleep, and at night I suddenly woke up and saw God right in front of me, in space. I cannot say it otherwise: a fantastic light, and everything, everything was visible down to microscopic detail, down to the hairs on the skin — and His gaze fixed on me. I immediately covered my face with the blanket and began pinching myself: my eyes were open, I felt pain from the pinches. I threw back the blanket again — He was looking at me. And for the first time I heard the sound of my own heart. It was beating inside like a hammer; the shock was incredible. I pulled the blanket over myself and lay like that for a long time, until I came to myself, until the sound of my heart went away. And the third time I threw the blanket back — and saw Him again. Then I screamed terribly. My mother rushed over: what happened? I was a closed boy and strong by nature, by character, with no sentimentality. I said nothing. Nothing, nothing. My mother thought I had cried out in my sleep. But I could no longer sleep and remained in that state for a long time. In the morning, when I got up, I said straight to my mother: ‘Mama, I saw God, that is why I cried out.’ I had been drawing since I was five, but after that a completely different drawing began. At fourteen I drew that stove. Now I look at those draperies, the stove, the shoe, and I myself am amazed — one does not draw like that at that age.”

The artist is certain: this was his birth as a human being. He thinks that when we are born, we do not feel or remember the shock that makes us cry. But if such a shock happens to you at a conscious age and you cry out, then you have been born as a person.

“When you said that you saw every hair in that fantastic light, I immediately imagined your works: the portraits of your daughter, the portrait of the artist’s wife, the dry bouquets, where every blade of grass, every hair, every wrinkle is drawn…”

“So that there would be light. So that I would obtain light.”

EVEN A THIEF-IN-LAW HAD MORE EDUCATION THAN OUR ARTIST DID

“Did your manner of drawing come from a teacher or from nature?”

He names as his only teacher Yervand Kochar, the creator of the artistic principle of “painting in space,” who spent his youth in Paris and was repressed after returning to his homeland.

“From my nature. I was not taught to draw — I learned to draw. To express yourself honestly in art: that is the school. Kochar was my spiritual teacher. We were friends, although he was fifty-two and I was fifteen. I drew old men sitting on benches in the garden near the opera. They did not even notice me, and I made hundreds of sketches very, very quickly. Suddenly I heard someone breathing behind my back. I was proud; I did not like people paying attention to me. I turned around: the man had an extraordinary face. He asked me where I studied. And I had just been expelled from the art school. Before that I had only four years of ordinary school. In my generation even a thief-in-law had more education. I could not tolerate any violence — that is the whole point. That is why I could not study; I fought; I looked like a hooligan. That is what everyone thought; they did not understand me. But such labels weigh heavily. I felt it. I had to preserve my ‘I.’ My brother was against me, my parents were against me, my teachers were against me. But I was certain I was an artist. That I was different. There were many blows. One: I was four years old, and my mother woke my brother and gave him chocolate, but did not give me any. I pretended to be asleep. I loved my mother very much, but I have remembered it all my life. At eleven my father struck me on the head while I was sleeping, because of my incredible love. I do not remember being a boy. I was serious from the very beginning. People said of me: he was born with a beard. And at eleven, an ascetic child, I fell in love with an adult woman. But I preserved my freedom. The blows could not penetrate inside me and wound anything there. Inside, I remained very healthy. When Kochar looked at my drawings, he cried out: ‘Leonardo lives!’ It was the first time I had heard that name. I thought I drew like Repin, but it turned out that these were higher classical principles. I was stunned when he first brought me books on Leonardo, and I saw Leonardo’s draperies. I remembered how I had climbed up the stairs to the mezzanine and hung my own draperies there. But what is interesting is that Leonardo drew them when he was already grown, while I drew like that as a boy.”

“WHEN YOU MAKE EYES IN PLACE OF AN EYE, AND A HAND IN PLACE OF A HAND…”

Khachatryan’s life is divided into ten-year cycles. Fate arranged it so. The 1950s were youth, realistic drawing. The 1960s were modernism, the beginning of the manner he calls “open forms.” The 1970s were the Moscow period, a return to the youthful drawing on paper, but in another quality. The 1980s were a discovery: drawing on levkas. The 1990s were the London period, a return to the open forms of his youth.

He was always searching for the formula of man. And he found it in man’s open forms — literally opening the human being, plastically entering inside, into the very material fabric. This gradual destruction of human flesh, this transformation of man from the familiar creature visible to us into something entirely different, constitutes the artist’s mystery; it may repel the onlooker and call after it the sympathetic viewer, the companion.

“In fact, all this is realism. But it is spiritual realism. I have discovered the art as it will be, perhaps, in a hundred years. Look: Egyptian art is closed. Silhouette thinking. The pharaoh sits tightly compressed; you cannot enter his space; there is no gap between his arms and his body. That is mysticism. What did Antiquity do? It opened the space between arms and legs, created movement. Spatial thinking. The difference between Egyptian art and Antiquity is centuries. In the twentieth century X-rays appeared; we had already entered inside the human being, opened him to sight. It is not the stomach or the heart that concerns us — not that. Man, in the philosophical sense, became an open form, and I show this in my art.”

The large cycle of the latest period is called Metamorphoses. The artist, who admits that all his life he has read one book — the Bible — was deeply struck by the passage in the Gospel of Thomas that says: “When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner as the outer, and the upper as the lower… when you make eyes in place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and an image in place of an image — then you will enter the Kingdom.” The second passage important to him is from the Gospel of Philip: “When Eve was in Adam, there was no death. After she separated from him, death appeared. If she enters him again and he accepts her, death will be no more.” This last phrase can be understood as love. Love conquers death. Time turns into eternity. But the artist sees things, including philosophical things, plastically.

“In the philosophical sense, what is most important in visual art?”

“To create time. Time is the idea that tormented many artists in the twentieth century.”

“To create it or to capture it?”

“To capture and to create. From the two-dimensional plane, the Renaissance created the three-dimensional by discovering perspective. But what about time? We do not see it, but it also exists. As a fourth dimension. Artists began to see it, to create mechanical time, as my teacher once did in Paris. I discovered that time can be conveyed by showing an adult person carrying within himself the child he once was. Two images in one. Here the child wants to catch a butterfly, while the mother sleeps. And here the child looks into a mirror, and the adult looks into a mirror. When two ages, two states are in one, time already enters there. From this comes the transition from the dual unity of different figures — mother and child, lovers, husband and wife — to the double state of a single human being.”

“We carry within ourselves not only childhood, but also our continuation and our end, unknown to us in real life…”

“Perhaps that is why my figures began to multiply. It came after the heart attack. I cannot decide anything with my mind; everything happens by itself. I cannot forget how Kochar, after looking at my small landscapes — you remember them at the exhibition — said: die, die now, and you will remain in Armenian visual art as a wonderful graphic artist. I was eighteen then. Now I understand Kochar, why he said that. It is a complete world. In terms of culture and mastery, I can say that boldly. But my ‘I’ moves, and I see it.”

REALISM MEANS DISCOVERING HIDDEN REALITY

“So, one must either develop within one quality, or change the quality itself?”

“No. One must be born again. There are people who are born many times. Suddenly it becomes boring and cramped; you cannot find a place for yourself. Fate leads me. I had to fall in love with Natasha and come to Moscow in the 1970s. Although everything was terribly complicated, because I love children. But I had to leave Yerevan. And it is an astonishing thing, how I came to London and how I worked there. It was not that I thought: let me see what is latest in modernism. No, my open forms, which had lived within me all those years with their own subconscious life, suddenly received an impulse; any realism became boring to me. I lived in London not for three years, but perhaps for forty. Condensed time. I made eight hundred works! I destroyed two hundred of them. Of course, I regret fifteen or twenty. I recently told a sculptor friend who came there: no one understands what a day is — it is an enormous stretch of time; do you know how much can be done in a day? A second became enormous for me, like an hour; the space of time increased in scale.”

Perhaps they are connected: the expansion of the scale of time and the multiplication of figures on Khachatryan’s levkas works, which exert a strange, mesmerizing effect on your psyche, when from the multiple images, forming something like honeycombs or caves, you begin to see a kind of primal matter created by the spirit. And then the artist tells me about his childhood fantasy, when, as a little ascetic in love with an adult woman, he wanted to live with her an underground life, and in his dreams he did live precisely in underground caves. Truly, the human psyche is a mysterious thing. What does it transform into art?

Vsevolod, Natasha’s son, adopted by Rudolf and himself an artist, says that today, when people speak of crisis and the commercialization of visual art, here is a man who does not break and does not compromise, including financially: having been one of the richest artists in Moscow, with a large number of commissions, he dropped everything and began something else.

“I am an island. Natasha and Seva connect me with the whole world. Work is going on inside me all the time, subconsciously. That is why I speak of at least two states. Realism is not about imitating nature, but about discovering the hidden thing that we do not see. I do not feel myself to be a formalist in the least; I do not love formalism. When one imitates nature, that is not yet art. It is ability. I never imitated nature, even as a child.”

“And when you drew your remarkable shoe?”

“That is not imitation. I saw a miracle in the shoe. If you do not see the miracle, you are not an artist. That is the whole difference. You become a true creator when you create something other, something that does not exist in nature, but is just as lawful, with the same grammar as the visible world. Then you are a creator. Before that you are talented, capable, promising, but…”

HE IS THAT ADAM WHO BECAME HUMANITY

“Two heart attacks — are they the price paid for the resistance with which one has to live in this world, or punishment for something?”

“I have always lived against health. Smoking is harmful, drinking is harmful, receiving friends is harmful, sleeping little and working much is harmful. But what is astonishing is that after the heart attack I felt ten times better than before. I quit smoking and felt an incredible uplift. I remembered myself at fifteen or sixteen, when I could draw twenty or twenty-two hours without a break. I walked thirty kilometers. I did physical strength exercises as in youth, and I was already fifty-five. Then, after seven months, came the second heart attack. Then things became worse: pulmonary edema, shortness of breath. I realized I would die there, that I had to go to Moscow. And I came. Here they cured me.”

“Did you experience the events connected with Karabakh, with the earthquake in Armenia, from here?”

“When the earthquake happened, I flew to Leninakan. I left there a sick man. I could not bear to hear those sounds of living people buried under the ruins. My friends sent me away from there, protected me. One of them was the philosopher Levon Abramian. In 1988 I opened a personal exhibition in Yerevan. I wanted to raise the spirit of my people. I did everything at my own expense, and what I earned I gave to the Karabakh people.”

“Did Karabakh find reflection in your work?”

“Thematically, no; spiritually, yes. Human tragedy always exists; it existed before Karabakh too, and I feel it acutely. Tragedy is already given to man. And besides, I am Armenian. The Genocide sits in the blood. I never wanted to be externally national as an artist. What is national in an artist? Plasticity, proportions. These mountains, these trees, these people, these passions. Everything begins with national culture, and then it turns out to be world culture. I remember how astonished I was when I once felt Japanese art as something native to me. I am Italian, and French, and a Black man too; I am Picasso and I am primitive man. I am an artist; I must carry everything within myself. I am not merely myself. I am everything. I am that Adam who became humanity. If this humanity were gathered together again, one Adam would result.”

“How did you respond to what began to happen in the USSR, in Russia, in Armenia?”

“It had to happen. Everything is written in the Apocalypse. Everything was appointed long ago.”

“Are you not afraid of death?”

“No. I simply think of those close to me. They will lose me; I will not lose them.”

“Are you a happy man?”

“Yes. Now. If there had been no London period, I would not be a happy man.”

“But when you made that shoe or the small landscape, were you not happy then? What did you feel — remember?”

“Love. It is all love. Incredible love in vision. That was another happiness. I always felt that the world inside me had not yet been expressed. And now I came to the exhibition — I have no place in the studio where I could see it all. The greatest happiness for an artist is to see everything. I liked it. That means I thought correctly. It is the first time I have felt this.”

The opening of man under the distinctive sign of the khachkar — the stone cross — in the special inscription “R.Kh.” at the House of Artists on Krymskaya Embankment continues.

Olga Kuchkina