Between Olympus and Golgotha
In the oldest history of painting, compiled by Pliny the Elder, the account of every significant artist begins: "He was the first..." Thus: Kleophant was the first to outline his figures in brown; Euphir the first to draw the ideal figure, and Pausius the first to learn to render complex perspective...
The history of art could be carried up to the present in much the same way, as a history of discoveries. To make his mark, an artist will have been first in some way: the pioneer of a new subject matter, developer of a new method of painting, discoverer of new ways of communicating emotion or, finally, as discoverer of new sources of spiritual energy in much the way that new sources of energy--steam, electricity, atomic energy--have been found in the course of the Industrial Revolution.
Alexei Kyrilloff, a Russian artist half of whose life has been spent in Greece, has found such a source of energy in an unexpected melding of ancient subject-matter and Christian ideas. He is drawn to the sacred as understood by these very various people in their very different ages. And he has succeeded in finding a point of perfect equilibrium between very different cultures, for it is not religion as such that sets his works apart. Rather it is his spiritual openness, his essential Hellenism, his sharing fully in the poetic, ancient Greek way of apprehending the world.
Contemporary art has become a battlefield between Destroyer and Creator. Sometimes both are reflected in the work of a single artist, just as night and day are parts of a unity. Sometimes one principle has ruled for generations.
Signally, when Creator has reigned, artists of the most different kind have found nurture in the same source: the legendary homeland of all the sciences and arts, Ancient Greece, which "Europe remembers as its cradle, the earthly paradise: where the gods descended from the heavens and rubbed shoulders with people", where mankind felt itself a necessary part of the universe. Again and again, the ancient has demonstrated its powers as template of contemporary reality.
Kyrilloff's understanding of long-hallowed Ancient Greece from within and without--his profound introjection of the myths while remaining a person of the 21st century--has meant that he finds his "alpha" and "omega" not in the myths as "sources" or "agglomerations"--but in their very essence: as the basics of the laws of human life. In his creations, antiquity is neither a "borrowing" nor an "influence". It exists in vital and dynamic relationship to the basic themes of contemporary spirituality, shared by the artist. For the Greek myths contain ideas adopted by Christianity. The myths themselves constitute the enduring "natural language" of religion.
The creation of order out of chaos--making life human--is the fundamental theme of Kyrilloff's work, who certainly prefers Olympian day to the "chthonic" night, Apollonian orderliness to the elemental eruptions of paganism and in whose works beauty and morality are one. He uses classical images as they were used in early Christian art, as symbols to express contemporary ideas. For him, ancient civilization is not a tomb of moribund ideals, conjectures, artefacts. Rather his art is alive with the sense of the connectedness of time. Journeying through the dimensions of time and culture, the artist throws his arms about these different worlds, seeks to include one in the other and to make it possible for them to communicate with each other.
He sees the world and humanity, the material and the spiritual, as products of order and beauty. To make this clearer, Kyrilloff uses a language far more complex than words: his works are built on equilibrium, proportions; nature is represented by equivalents of plasticity and colour. His forms recall the moment of their emotional apprehension while having magical, symbolic meanings: the bone, which by the wizardry of art gives the impression of the living body, the sign of the distant past, the essence, the nucleus; the tree that connects heaven and earth; the mirror. This world, indeed, is an endless labyrinth of mirrors, images that somehow rhyme, the harmonies among them, the all that is reflected in everything.
The mirror, which reflects and doubles, recreates the mythical image of "androgyne", symbol of universal harmony in the presence in one entity of all qualities and capacities, whether traditionally masculine or feminine.
In restoring unity, Kyrilloff reminds human beings (who are by definition always incomplete) of the true standard of existence. The figures in the painting, After the Victory, are androgynous, and their sensuality is restrained. Plato thought of love, of Eros, as the thirst for wholeness, a foretaste of universal harmony. The ascent to the highest beauty, though it would proceed by way of beautiful words and actions, is rooted in gazing on the beautiful body.
Paired images of men and women, harmonious in their unity, ascend in Kyrilloff's paintings toward the classic norm of the unity of physical and spiritual beauty, to what Ancient Hellas knew as kalokagathia. But all Kyrilloff's stern Christian saints, their ascents achieved alone, are shown quite differently. These are holy relics where greatness of soul breaks through the fragile bodily coverings. Haloed rays sit on the heads like thorny crowns, recalling the agony of Christ accepting death for the sins of mankind.
The world created by Kyrilloff is dynamic; evil, the sinking into death, is a necessary constituent. In After the Victory, the indestructibility of evil is present as a refrain: against the background of a general end of hostilities, the warrior having cast off his armour and weapons, a snake crawls from the maw of the mortally wounded dragon, a new embodiment of the evil of the world.
Life is, above all, things in motion caused by differences in potential, like particles in an electrical circuit. Equilibrium must be disturbed if motion is to ensue: in the painting, Conception (a new version of a Gospel scene), Mary is transformed, or dematerialized, from earthly woman into the Mother of Christ, and the Devil watches.
Alexei Kyrilloff creates a new reality, all the customary and habitual transformed, a new kind of being revealed. The world of the artist carries within itself the image of the original cosmos as understood by the ancient Greeks, divided into opposites but retaining an elemental unity. The theme is concretized in heavily delineated figures and signs: sun, moon, a river, the flower of life with sky-blue petals, the contrasting squares of the chessboard, such as might have appeared in the Geometric style on an archaic vase.
In Greek vase-painting, the alternation of the squares of the chessboard stood for the unbreakable nature of the life process, its potential infinitude--earth and sky, land and water, day and night, dark and light, life and death, separate but inseparable. Change, then, is the alternation of day by night, life by death, the eternal, unceasing, relentless life process.
The chessboard squares, black and white, dark and light, beginning and end, are personified in the paintings and objects of Alexei Kyrilloff as angel and devil, as "alpha" and "omega" (the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet), as sun and moon, as images of father and son, of Hades and Persephone. Persephone, daughter of Demetra, who appears on earth after the winter, after loss, after dying, is an image of spring and new life, touching and vulnerable. The pomegranate in her hands, gift of the wily Hades, is a reminder of her inevitable return to the Kingdom of the Dead.
The idea of eternal return is integral to all Greek conceptions of existence, mythological and philosophical. But this artist, as early Christian artists did, also associates the pomegranate with the blood spilt by Christ on the Cross and the return of Persephone from the land of the dead is linked to the resurrection of the Son of God.
Work born out of strong emotion retains the portion of energy that motivated it. The mood or condition of the soul is "written into", "imprinted on" the work. Loss, isolation, absence of warmth, subconscious fears--these have long been the principle themes of the majority of artists. And so the viewer has developed his defences, ranging from indifference to active dislike. But contemporary art is also now understood as serious, intense, spiritual labour. The process of creation implies an extreme concentration of physical and spiritual effort.
Alexei Kyrilloff, always true to himself, shares the best in himself with a viewer. His striking range of associations forces us to look anew at our usual, "exhausted", truths. In bringing together the techniques of icon painting and a modern manner, in the variety of the perspectives employed, the artist opens a dialogue with the viewer that appeals to all the spiritual capacities of the contemporary individual.
Kyrilloff's art uses every means at its command to bring us to a positive view of life ... to help us rise above the everyday. He neither promises us Olympus or frightens us with Golgotha. But both these heights of the human soul are invisibly present in his work.
Olga Morozova
Candidate in art history,
senior staff associate of the
A.S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts
In the oldest history of painting, compiled by Pliny the Elder, the account of every significant artist begins: "He was the first..." Thus: Kleophant was the first to outline his figures in brown; Euphir the first to draw the ideal figure, and Pausius the first to learn to render complex perspective...
The history of art could be carried up to the present in much the same way, as a history of discoveries. To make his mark, an artist will have been first in some way: the pioneer of a new subject matter, developer of a new method of painting, discoverer of new ways of communicating emotion or, finally, as discoverer of new sources of spiritual energy in much the way that new sources of energy--steam, electricity, atomic energy--have been found in the course of the Industrial Revolution.
Alexei Kyrilloff, a Russian artist half of whose life has been spent in Greece, has found such a source of energy in an unexpected melding of ancient subject-matter and Christian ideas. He is drawn to the sacred as understood by these very various people in their very different ages. And he has succeeded in finding a point of perfect equilibrium between very different cultures, for it is not religion as such that sets his works apart. Rather it is his spiritual openness, his essential Hellenism, his sharing fully in the poetic, ancient Greek way of apprehending the world.
Contemporary art has become a battlefield between Destroyer and Creator. Sometimes both are reflected in the work of a single artist, just as night and day are parts of a unity. Sometimes one principle has ruled for generations.
Signally, when Creator has reigned, artists of the most different kind have found nurture in the same source: the legendary homeland of all the sciences and arts, Ancient Greece, which "Europe remembers as its cradle, the earthly paradise: where the gods descended from the heavens and rubbed shoulders with people", where mankind felt itself a necessary part of the universe. Again and again, the ancient has demonstrated its powers as template of contemporary reality.
Kyrilloff's understanding of long-hallowed Ancient Greece from within and without--his profound introjection of the myths while remaining a person of the 21st century--has meant that he finds his "alpha" and "omega" not in the myths as "sources" or "agglomerations"--but in their very essence: as the basics of the laws of human life. In his creations, antiquity is neither a "borrowing" nor an "influence". It exists in vital and dynamic relationship to the basic themes of contemporary spirituality, shared by the artist. For the Greek myths contain ideas adopted by Christianity. The myths themselves constitute the enduring "natural language" of religion.
The creation of order out of chaos--making life human--is the fundamental theme of Kyrilloff's work, who certainly prefers Olympian day to the "chthonic" night, Apollonian orderliness to the elemental eruptions of paganism and in whose works beauty and morality are one. He uses classical images as they were used in early Christian art, as symbols to express contemporary ideas. For him, ancient civilization is not a tomb of moribund ideals, conjectures, artefacts. Rather his art is alive with the sense of the connectedness of time. Journeying through the dimensions of time and culture, the artist throws his arms about these different worlds, seeks to include one in the other and to make it possible for them to communicate with each other.
He sees the world and humanity, the material and the spiritual, as products of order and beauty. To make this clearer, Kyrilloff uses a language far more complex than words: his works are built on equilibrium, proportions; nature is represented by equivalents of plasticity and colour. His forms recall the moment of their emotional apprehension while having magical, symbolic meanings: the bone, which by the wizardry of art gives the impression of the living body, the sign of the distant past, the essence, the nucleus; the tree that connects heaven and earth; the mirror. This world, indeed, is an endless labyrinth of mirrors, images that somehow rhyme, the harmonies among them, the all that is reflected in everything.
The mirror, which reflects and doubles, recreates the mythical image of "androgyne", symbol of universal harmony in the presence in one entity of all qualities and capacities, whether traditionally masculine or feminine.
In restoring unity, Kyrilloff reminds human beings (who are by definition always incomplete) of the true standard of existence. The figures in the painting, After the Victory, are androgynous, and their sensuality is restrained. Plato thought of love, of Eros, as the thirst for wholeness, a foretaste of universal harmony. The ascent to the highest beauty, though it would proceed by way of beautiful words and actions, is rooted in gazing on the beautiful body.
Paired images of men and women, harmonious in their unity, ascend in Kyrilloff's paintings toward the classic norm of the unity of physical and spiritual beauty, to what Ancient Hellas knew as kalokagathia. But all Kyrilloff's stern Christian saints, their ascents achieved alone, are shown quite differently. These are holy relics where greatness of soul breaks through the fragile bodily coverings. Haloed rays sit on the heads like thorny crowns, recalling the agony of Christ accepting death for the sins of mankind.
The world created by Kyrilloff is dynamic; evil, the sinking into death, is a necessary constituent. In After the Victory, the indestructibility of evil is present as a refrain: against the background of a general end of hostilities, the warrior having cast off his armour and weapons, a snake crawls from the maw of the mortally wounded dragon, a new embodiment of the evil of the world.
Life is, above all, things in motion caused by differences in potential, like particles in an electrical circuit. Equilibrium must be disturbed if motion is to ensue: in the painting, Conception (a new version of a Gospel scene), Mary is transformed, or dematerialized, from earthly woman into the Mother of Christ, and the Devil watches.
Alexei Kyrilloff creates a new reality, all the customary and habitual transformed, a new kind of being revealed. The world of the artist carries within itself the image of the original cosmos as understood by the ancient Greeks, divided into opposites but retaining an elemental unity. The theme is concretized in heavily delineated figures and signs: sun, moon, a river, the flower of life with sky-blue petals, the contrasting squares of the chessboard, such as might have appeared in the Geometric style on an archaic vase.
In Greek vase-painting, the alternation of the squares of the chessboard stood for the unbreakable nature of the life process, its potential infinitude--earth and sky, land and water, day and night, dark and light, life and death, separate but inseparable. Change, then, is the alternation of day by night, life by death, the eternal, unceasing, relentless life process.
The chessboard squares, black and white, dark and light, beginning and end, are personified in the paintings and objects of Alexei Kyrilloff as angel and devil, as "alpha" and "omega" (the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet), as sun and moon, as images of father and son, of Hades and Persephone. Persephone, daughter of Demetra, who appears on earth after the winter, after loss, after dying, is an image of spring and new life, touching and vulnerable. The pomegranate in her hands, gift of the wily Hades, is a reminder of her inevitable return to the Kingdom of the Dead.
The idea of eternal return is integral to all Greek conceptions of existence, mythological and philosophical. But this artist, as early Christian artists did, also associates the pomegranate with the blood spilt by Christ on the Cross and the return of Persephone from the land of the dead is linked to the resurrection of the Son of God.
Work born out of strong emotion retains the portion of energy that motivated it. The mood or condition of the soul is "written into", "imprinted on" the work. Loss, isolation, absence of warmth, subconscious fears--these have long been the principle themes of the majority of artists. And so the viewer has developed his defences, ranging from indifference to active dislike. But contemporary art is also now understood as serious, intense, spiritual labour. The process of creation implies an extreme concentration of physical and spiritual effort.
Alexei Kyrilloff, always true to himself, shares the best in himself with a viewer. His striking range of associations forces us to look anew at our usual, "exhausted", truths. In bringing together the techniques of icon painting and a modern manner, in the variety of the perspectives employed, the artist opens a dialogue with the viewer that appeals to all the spiritual capacities of the contemporary individual.
Kyrilloff's art uses every means at its command to bring us to a positive view of life ... to help us rise above the everyday. He neither promises us Olympus or frightens us with Golgotha. But both these heights of the human soul are invisibly present in his work.
Olga Morozova
Candidate in art history,
senior staff associate of the
A.S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts
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