Morning of the Sleepless

The Russian Field of Painterly Experiments

The painting of Egor Fedorychev is an unusually open and impassioned statement, a rarity these days. From the very beginning of his artistic career, his work has been marked by decisiveness and even a kind of headlong abandon in the creative act. After three Moscow institutions in succession — GITIS, the Institute of Contemporary Art Problems, and the Rodchenko School — he managed, in the second half of the 2010s, to develop his own painterly language in just a few years. Established artistic forms — including the very notion of the picture as such — strike him as an obstacle to the emotional nature of art. He is now at a stage of creative maturity in which his earlier formal achievements seem to him too fixed, too defined; wanting to escape the expectations of the public, Fedorychev is capable of “turning the game upside down” and once again doing something wholly unexpected in art.

He continues to experiment with the genre of the painterly installation, which in his hands has now become fully immersive. The foundation of his work is no longer a primed canvas but an almost throwaway material — floor-cleaning rags, draped loosely and softly across the gallery walls. This creates an unusual space and a completely different painterly atmosphere, evoking a broad field dusted with the season’s first snow. The hunt has only just ended here.

There are certain things no film or book can help us understand or feel; they cannot be grasped when viewed through the distancing screens of art. They can only be experienced in the place itself, and hunting is one of these things. The tracks of birds and animals, their life and death imprinted on the snow, form the first sequence of visual images evoked by the painter, who turns the clear cartography of nature into a tense drama of violence, moving from abstraction to figuration and back again. “What does the one who pulls the trigger feel?” is a question the artist has asked himself, and that continues to trouble him, calling to mind the well-known exchange between Picasso and the German officer who saw Guernica: “Tell me, did you do this?” — “No, you did.” Morning of the Sleepless is an anti-painting, addressed to nature and taking nature’s side.

Fedorychev quite literally unfurls the panorama of a hunt that has already taken place. When he began the work, the artist wrote: “The dirty paints have soaked deep into the surface of the piece like events sinking into time, like a red wound slowly healing beneath transparent, milky-white skin, like snow quietly covering scraps of torn flesh” — this is what the morning looks like after a blood-soaked slaughter. Painting cannot convey the smell of the animal or its cry, yet one can immediately imagine the filthy churn of blood and snow, and the exhausted creature whose pearly hide has been foully stained in its final moments, scarcely different from a person awaiting execution.

The color palette sets this project apart from all the hunting paintings that adorn ancestral estates and museum halls. The paint on those old canvases serves convention, depicting animals bleeding out; in Fedorychev’s works, the drips and splashes of color are meant to become real blood and dirt. The orderly arrangements of figures and the recognizable poses visible from a distance must give way to a blurred abstraction blinded by furious proximity, embodying genuine death and suffering. It’s a “Union of the Bestialized” — the name of a radical noise rock project in which Fedorychev performs.

The artist takes nature’s side — but not the gentle, playful kind that surrounds Disney fawns and songbirds. Through the process of painting, Fedorychev forms an alliance with dense, impenetrably dark nature, thick and viscous like the bituminous varnish he works with, where a stag with heavy antlers is trapped in deep snow and crows gather to wait for their feast. Morning of the Sleepless is a monumental score: not Mozart, but Wagner; not May, but February unfolds across Fedorychev’s canvases.

Pavel Gerasimenko

Project Partner: Hovard Art Foundation Cultural Projects Fund

Photo: Ivan Sorokin