The Colour of Pomegranates.

Andrey Belle's rapid rise to fame has thrown many art critics and curators into confusion. Indeed, all the criteria of today's mainstream suggest thathe should have no chance of success.Firstly, he stands alone, having never received the blessing of thatimpersonal curatorial museum/gallery establishment which determines the rules of the game today. But most importantly, he works with a material which that very establishment has declared irrelevant. He is inconvenient, if not downright hostile to them. His material is that of desire, the senses, of sexual languor, of unrealised and foreseen passions. It is sensual and romantic, with no desire to act like the subject of contemporary art, which is by very definition hermetic, impenetrable, existing according to its own logic. His is an art, moreover, which throws all its forces against the postmodernist logic of art as text, as self-sufficient, alienated both from its creator and its auditorium. For all these reasons, Belle should surely be doomed to irrelevance, to superfluity. Somehow, however, things have proved otherwise. I shall seek to explain the reasons for this unforeseen, unplanned success. The key lies in today's specific artist context (I refer here to the mainstream, supported and formed as it is by a powerful establishment of up-to-the-minute contemporary art, with all its theoretical, material and media potential). Much has been achieved by this art which perceives itself as text: self-sufficiency, self-obsession, independence of any obligations. Obligations either to the author and his life, his ambitions, weaknesses, dramas, loves and hates, or to the outside world, with its logic, common sense, spirituality and banality, its routine and its flights of extravagance. Art which is textual, existential, cut off from everything as if by bullet-proof glass. We can easily picture the archetypal contemporary collection, put together on the basis of recommendations from advisers according to the accepted conventions of the mainstream establishment. The objects are fully worthy of attention, representing the foremost artistic ideas and strategies, demonstrating the owner's hipness, his involvement in the artistic process. But nothing more. Even in museum collections this impersonality and archetypal approach are coming to be perceived as the effect of inertia: everything is too impersonal, too sterile, too bland. And as for the private collection! How is it possible to live in the same space as a selection of such self-sufficient, enclosed works, which cannot by definition be "de hermeticised"? Visiting several such collections in New York with an international group of curators, I noted their excellent quality, but it was clear that they were utterly alien to the lives of
their owners. I found myself thinking that the scattered toys of one collector's grandchildren were no less intriguing to me than the art objects: even the passing visitor has a tangible need to overcome the alienation radiating from such art. This is a real and highly relevant problem facing artistic culture today: that of the perception of art and the context of art, its existence in our lives. It has led to a growing interest in phenomena which had apparently been squeezed out of the sphere of modern art for ever, phenomena which are once again emerging from museums onto the art scene, and onto the art market: Art Deco, various Surrealist trends, the work of Klossowski and Balthus. Art which is fascinating, tempting and intriguing. Belle's work and the attention it is receiving must be seen in the context of this new interest in a sociable art, an art which relies on response - and notably on emotional response. My personal conviction is that such art is in demand precisely because it gives form to those moments which are so catastrophically missing in the dynamics of everyday life - romantic emotions, sexual languor, a sensual perception of every moment. In a word, Belle has chosen the right strategy. Was his choice made after long reflection or was it intuitive? I cannot say. It was probably intuitive. He is not a master of intellectual constructs. Belle is a master of the senses. Of pauses. Of emotional states. Such is his character, his nature. He does not analyse, but tends rather to look and listen attentively. I remember how - before the jeeps and snowmobiles which came along with success - he used to listen carefully to simple household mechanisms - to clocks and telephones belonging to his friends - and then fix them in a trice. Thus it is that he looks at those objects which will go to make up a still life, the material from which such a work is then built up. Thus he taps and strokes some old plank which will be his picture, not the support but the very tactile flesh of the work itself. Thus it is that he lingers at the flea market, looking penetratingly at some old photograph or manuscript which he will introduce into the fabric of the image. Is he then, a lonely voyeur, passeist and intuitive? Certainly, the qualities described above would seem to confirm that image. As would the lifestyle he has led in recent years. After many unsettled and nomadic years (on completing higher education he tried his hand in several different spheres and came to be an arts manger, travelling with musical and artistic collectives throughout Russia and the West), Belle created a Home. The kind of Home which is always written with a capital letter, the kind of Home which is, according to old Russian tradition, a shelter, a refuge. (Russian scholars of 19th-century artistic culture know the theme well, for it recurs frequently in their work - "the motif of refuge in the work of such and such an artist..."). Belle lives near St Petersburg in this large house built according to his own design, on a hill in a bend of the upper reaches of the River Neva. He does not often come into town. Nature, the secluded location, the low horizon, water... A veritable Lakeland School.... Yet at the same time Belle is a very modern man, using a computer in his work, getting around in a jeep and on a snowmobile, fully competent to judge the relative merits of different kinds of aqualung equipment, seriously into underwater diving in the most exotic locations. Living within the rhythms and stresses of today's world. Apparently, therefore, fully comprehending the danger of alienation which is inseparable from those rhythms and stresses. Perhaps it is as a compensation for this that his is art is so human, so open. Let us begin with his still lives. A common theme and selection of objects runs through them all: bottles and jars, pharmaceutical vessels, old kerosene lamps... Fanciful forms, but, most importantly, enigmatic and mysterious visual effects: the strange fragmentation of rays of light, unexpected inner luminescence, elusive reflections and sparks. Fish – dried to paper lightness, or simply smoke-dried, edible, ready to put on the table. Fish which demonstrate their structure, their anatomy, the skeleton, and yet appetising... Lastly, the fruits of the earth: onions and potatoes, apples... and pomegranates. Most frequently pomegranates, a point of some significance. Pomegranates are the key to Belle's poetics. Quasi-real pomegranates, almost corporeal, as if we can taste the bitterness, seem to embody Belle's sensual outlook. A concordance between the fruit theme, with all those accompanying cultural associations of temptation, and purely visual anthropomorphity, an excuse for something spherical, tactile, squeezable - a kind of painted writing... Sensibility overflowing into sensuality. A sensuality which has not quite managed to become manifest, an elusive sensuality. Here, to me, is Belle's main secret. On the one hand he seeks to objectivise both the object's form and the emotions behind it. The plank, picked out from amongst many apparently identical planks, weighed and endlessly assessed, preserving the warmth of the sun and some now non-existent (such planks are usually taken from the remains of a dismantled wooden house), sets in train this "objectivisation". This is not just a surface, like the panel on which an icon is painted; this wooden support has symbolic meanings and emotional content. Next the role of "objectiviser" is taken up by painting itself - painting which is concrete, tactile, warm, handmade in the full sense of the word. Objectivity, "objectivisation", corporeality - the theme resounds sharply throughout; such it would seem is the work's content. But not so. Of no less importance is the theme of elusiveness, ambiguity, of mystery... (This theme is deeply rooted in Russian culture: there was a whole sphere of work in the 18th and 19th centuries known as "obmanki" - deceptive, illusionistic still life or nudes. The objects were painted so convincingly that a viewer felt he had only to hold out his hand to touch the fruit or the warm female body – but instead he found only canvas). This theme too is realised through very specific devices. The object's form, particularly when the object is not natural but handmade, is - for all its illusionistic, convincing nature - quite openly a generalisation. You notice this when you are distracted from the form of the natural (fruits, fish etc) and from natural, apparently carefully observed lighting effects. Then you see that the image is in fact graphic and linear, that its summary nature is emphasised by a broken, even exaggerated contour. Finally, the motif of generalisation -temporal in this case – is supported by the appropriation of old photographs and manuscripts. Welded into the fabric of the work, they are not there for the sake of literary suggestion or to make historical references. Their natural function is to provide a sense of the majestic flow of time... That is, they are there to provide a generalisation, to mark the deceptive nature of the "here and now" which we inertly perceive as given. Belle thus balances himself between the objective presence and elusiveness, between quasi-corporeality which promises possession and the impossibility of possession... This theme of ambivalent possession continues in the artist's images of women. In extremely concentrated form. Corporeality, sensuality and eroticism are here not guessed at, sought for, expected. They are primordial categories determining form and meaning. Belle paints women who are openly erotic, attractive and tempting. He presents his nudes as precious jewels, painting the rich surface, the ennobling texture, the attributes, with immense love and care. As Andre Malraux wrote in his foreword to Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, "eroticism is also a kind of jewel". Belle relies upon a very concrete type of female sexuality. These are women of the Symbolist and Art Deco period: from the come-on female types of Klimt and Sacher-Masoch to the wantonly refined "American women in Paris". Yet he paints his models (or rather, variations of one and the same model - Belle's nude) from life. This is not stylisation. This is a game, a game of aesthetic sensuality, of refined eroticism. (The dialectics of the objective, quasi-real and ephemeral, the mirage, here too are combined with corporeality, right down to the transparent superficial strokes and the working up of masses, and with generalisation and the outline drawing.) But since this is a game, by accenting the tangibly fleshy, the directly accessible (all those poses, those garters and other attributes) Belle remains faithful to himself: reminding us of the impossible, the inaccessible, the elusive. Articulating the sexual, he does not forget the romantic. Stealing Beauty... Here lies Belle's poetry. Together with his works, adventure and intrigue enter your home. Physical, final possession of his works is deceptive. You have almost tasted the pomegranates, almost touched the desired flesh... But it all melts away, like a mirage. Yet still with an almost physically tangible possibility - almost an inevitability - of return... Each of us seeks to somehow resist the rationality and alienation of contemporary existence. For Andrey Belle, his weapon is confidence in the reality of the mirage.

Alexander Borovsky