Arts : Paintings : Evgeny Batchurin
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Selfportrait. Auto-litography, 77x61, 1982

Jury Gertscuk
THE LONELINESS OF THE SOUL
IN A SILENT LANDSCAPE
(Evgeny Batchurin)


We live waiting for the cherries
We live awaiting the summer
And if with hope only we breathe,
Let us be blamed later...

Thus sings Evgeny Batchurin, author, singer, artist and draftsman. The melody is strident, ringing, drawn out, often reminiscent of Russian popular songs; always rather nervy with unusual folklore-related acuity, charged with emotional moments, and unexpected ironical implications in accordance with tradition. The melody is contemporary, modern, filling up and engulfing the anguished distant shores of his paintings. It can be somewhere between the sky and the sea, between a heavy concrete pommel on crude cement railings, or a fluffy white cloud hanging from a deep-blue southern sky.
This note of hopeless expectancy, nonchalantly pulling a time stopped in its tracks, is hardly essential to Batchourine: The lingering time is not only related to nature such as the drawn out winter or the long autumn, it is also related to the passing of time of a human life drifting away without joy, without purpous. It is the twilight of the soul forgetting in her eternal expectancy, the colour of life and the taste of happiness.
I have forgotten how tasty the first cherries were
I just must live till the summer to remember...

People in sunny landscape. Auto-litography, 83x60, 1982
The endless wait for better times, the exhaustive timelessness, which barely years ago will be called. "The era of Stagnation", of course those are the crucial themes. Batchourine at times did not shun to speak openly about the actuality of political topics. In bis songs those are courageously tinted with a coarse and straight forward humour adapted from popular satirical poetry. But of course the lyrical motives are "eternal" and he saturates them to the maximum with contemporary implications. A man endowed with a restless nervous constitution, Batchourine tears along in search of himself. For years he puts aside his paint brushes for the sake of songs and then again returns to the easel. In between he remains an artist amazingly whole, incarnating in words, lines, colours and music his very own personal world.

The sky above the world, the wind above the sea,
the clouds are high above.
People under the sky, the fish under the sea,
the grains of sand underfoot...


"The loneliness of the soul in a silent scenery" - thus the artist had determined the catalogue's theme of an exhibition which took place some years ago.

...I would have sailed away with the wind
Only I have no oars...


A diminutive silhouette tossed on a shoreless sea, the man dresses himself against the onslought of cosmic and social elements. In both natural and historical time sequences, he is a toy of forces, endlessly exceeding his potential.

You are a droplet, I am a droplet
There's only the two of us.
Out of such droplets, the water
Will wash out the shore...


The usual heroes of his paintings are specks of everyday life, per-chance encountered people out of some old photograph, posing intensely in front of a camera, looking odd in their somewhat old fashioned cloths. Nameless, quasi faceless, these people carry upon themselves a clear imprint of their social strata and social status, of the spiritual climate of their era, its customs, tastes. These are not people of today's world. They belong already to the past even if not a distant one. They belong to the time of memories.
Raised on the southern sea-shores and full of memories of it, Batchourine camps his heroes among a typical resort - architecture decor, in a pre or post war pseudoclassical stage dressing, in a world of drafty collonades and plaster "girls with oars". However the unavoidable irony of the artist is interrupted and replaced by a deep longing for oblivion, a disappearance into a irremediable past towards people and times - into a secret fragile childhood - world of his own.
The paintings do not represent a real life, but nonetheless are not approximative clever allegories of some abstract thesis like political one for instance. These sharp and short sparks of some sort of visions, dreams of the past ARE charged with implications and precise. Himself looking rather wan, with cold metallic colour overtones, he is remote from what is currently accepted by artists to call "a sense of colour", Batchourine brings them out from the confines of reality. These deeply painted shadows and bleached sharp colours give the impression of an instant inprint. There are no strong events here but only the simple interraction of two figures cought in the picture plane, being experienced as a drammatic situation.
This is not about external situations, this is about himself, about his dreams, his own safegard, about his undounting hopes, about the inner dramas of life, about its brevity and attachment to place and time amidst limitless spaces and etenity. Batchourine writes about the eternal fight of man with himself, with the world with his own fate.

Fly little dove grey pigeon
Into the blue sky.
Oh! If only God had given me wings
I would fly after you.