Filonov
Filonov worked with three major themes or principles. Craftedness or
madeness, a property of objects that indicates their significance
based on projective intellect and knowledge. When you see a work of art,
you should be struck by the level of understanding present in the mind
of the artist, during the creation. This goes beyond technique in
producing the image, into knowledge producing the concepts depicted.
In his art, the organic flow of the images is similar to the notion of
emergent behavior, which comes from [Mark Jurik] systems theory. The representation
of nature for realists, the impressionists, etc., was that of form and
color. Filonov thought of this as trivial and trite, and put most
of his painting and theorizing research into the representation of organic
mechanisms for growth, evolution, interdependence, and interpentration.
These ideas are encapsulated in the term "Organic Machines" which appears
in the title of a paper below. Through my travels and visits of the
worlds best musuems, in America, Italy, France, and Spain, I was most impressed
with depth and quality of the work of Filonov. I first witnessed his works
in person at the show "The Great Utopia" at the Gugenheim in New York,
1992. The work "Man in the Universe" (image shown below) was unspeakably
clear in its execution with no brush strokes visible. It was as if I walked
into a window of the mind of the artist. A truely awesome experience. I
was examining the surface of the painting whereupon a museum guard asked
me to move away.
Filonov's work are a study in dimension and relation. He juxtaposes
fragements of images in various orientations. Is work can be viewed into
two relatively distinct subsets, one representational, where he uses fragments
of recognizable images, man, animals, houses, everyday objects with variations
on size, prespective, color, orientation to create a montage depicting
related ideas causing emotion. The second, kaliedoscopic or visionary images,
are formed of extremely large number of pieces, shapes, textures, colors,
working in synchrony to form a image with depth multiple interpretations.
Pavel Filonov was a Russian painter, who lived from 1883 through 1941,
when he died in the siege of Lenningrad. Of all the heroic figures of the
Russian avant-garde, Pavel Filonov has been one of the last to receive
the broad internation recognition he deserves. The reasons are both biographical
and art historical. Filonov was completely uncompromising which caused
many troubles throughout his life dedicated to art research and creation.
He painted actively from about 1912 through 1939, in oils and water colors.
He was a contemporary of the Russian avante-garde movement and referred
to as a member of the Cubo-Futurist movement by later art historians. Filonov's
work was not accepted by the mainstream tastes of the public at the time;
the government sanctioned work of socialist-realism -- and his work
was entirely different from the main themes of the Russian avante-garde,
including Malevich, Tatlin, and Rodechenko.