Heaven, "The Energy of Overcoming," Alexander Borovsky, Head of the Department of Contemporary Art, Russian Museum, pp. 5-9

The Energy of Overcoming

Edward Bekkerman has already worked in art for 30 years, demonstrating his enviable focus. It seems that he is indifferent to the evolution of the dominant discourses; in any case, perhaps to the detriment of the demands of the contemporary art establishment, he has never sought to force his work to serve as an illustration for this evolution. He has his plot of land that he cultivates in accordance with his ideas, despite the choice offered by this same establishment of perhaps more technological and effective means. It is as he agreed previously that his methods and tools might seem old fashioned. His only request is to leave him alone and not come onto his territory. But this is what is interesting—his old farmer-esque independence and stubbornness bear fruit. That which seems to be archaic incurs reactualization. And Bekkerman’s very obstinacy, against a background of the constant “shedding of skin” that many artists who live “from project to project” need to do, looks like the confidence of a man who is counting on his strengths far into the future and only needs his own internal resources.

I would define the location of “Bekkerman’s plot of land” as the following: the artist works on the border of representational painting, on the edge of the figurative. The painted element is prepared to blur the image; its language licks and absorbs the territory of the figurative. It is not a given that the artist will discover the figurative; it yields in a kind of struggle. Therefore, I would define one of important, pervasive lines of Bekkerman’s art as dramatic mimesis.

Bekkerman, naturally, is an evolved artist. But he is also an artist that constantly returns to the source, the states of re-thinking and re-feeling are natural for him.

Therefore, his art does lend itself to the procedure of cutting it up into chronological chunks. Several pervasive and constant lines coexist in his work, giving the artist’s art practice the effect of a stereoscope.

The body formed by his works begins with his works of the 1990s, Bekkerman’s first serious independent steps into art. It was then that the foundation was laid, so to speak, with the iconologically dispositional integrity of these lines. For Bekkerman—I will talk about this specifically later—French artistic culture of the new era has always been important. Thus, it would be logical to attempt to name these lines with the help of the words of Charles Baudelaire, who in many ways

determined the symbolist component of this culture. Anyway, Baudelaire wrote, “Man walks through a forest of symbols” (l’homme y passé a travers des forets de symboles). Bekkerman’s “forest of symbols” has become sufficiently thinned out.

Here are the main subjects the artist choice in his youth and to which he returns

again and again: flowers and angels. Curiously, Bekkerman’s painting, to which he turned to after a brief flirtation with sculpture (from which, however, in the future would serve as sources for sculptural objects in the second half of the ‘00s), immediately evoked a kind of “self-confidence.” It was expressive and extraverted. His interest in the European painting traditions of the postwar decades, the era of late modernism—the aggressive imagery of Art Brut, primarily Jean Dubuffet—was obvious.

In this series, the energy of overcoming is unfailingly present. The figurative (representational painting) constantly competes with the asymmetrical (outside of representational) essence of the color drama. It can be said that color splashes that are uncontrolled in their impulsiveness are almost reminiscent of action painting in their vigor, constantly undermining the representational contours.

Thus, the conflict of nonobjectivity with the figurative is not the main content of the series, but rather the energetic background. I am reminded of the words of Pablo Picasso: “Abstract art is only painting. And what’s so dramatic about that?”

We will begin with what is already in the iconography itself, in how Bekkerman sees all these classic characters of the Ecole de Paris, already the beginnings of the drama.

They are not cultural signs and not makes; they are all in certain emotional states, and behind each is an archetypal and cultural and an original, that is, a personally experienced, existential experience. These are only the prerequisites of the drama about which Picasso was talking. It is the drama of artistic realization that belongs to world of visual phenomena. The realization, in the process of which virtual images, in Picasso’s expression, “begin to boil.” Bekkerman fully possesses the techniques of concentration that Kazimir Malevich called “the painting mentality”: the definiteness of the grotesque is combined in him with the atomization of his own painted flesh, acquiring mirage-like quality and phantasmagoric qualities and requiring the appropriate regimes for managing flows of time. Here we give, as much as we can, so speak, a metaphorical and formal description of the phenomenon of dramatic mimesis. Another descriptive language inherent to modernism could be used for this same goal. Picasso also wrote about “forms and colors that have taken on the image of people preserve the vibration of their life.”

The series Flowers, which is just as long-lasting and has also been to subject to constant reactualization, has a completely different worldview and emotional drive.

The conflict between the mimetic and the impulsive and non-mimetic is removed here: the form takes on its structure, the simultaneity of the painted splashes falls into place, the perception of color itself is refined (large granules of color that refract light, letting it pass through, making one recall the Georges Rouault’s work in stained glass). But this is not the series’ main distinction.

Bekkerman’s flowers are spellbinding. The verb for this in Russian comes from an old world for sorcery, that is, attempts to practice magic as a process. It has a connotation that in today’s language is described as a psychedelic technique, as a meditative practice. We will try to make sense of it.

Bekkerman’s flower images are sleepwalking–they live their self-sufficient lives and bewitch just by the intrinsic value of their existence. The flowers draw the viewer “into themselves” in almost the literal sense of the word. The result of this process, however, is not that the viewer is forced to absorb colors, perceive smells, and almost tactilely feel the flesh of the epidermis. The process is not “set in motion” for this. In general, the result of this process cannot be describes in terms from a botanical dictionary.

Perhaps a dictionary of symbols, allegories, and figures of speech would fit better. It represents the metaphorical aspect of possession that has a sexual connotation associated with ancient metaphors (“the flower of wishes,” to pick the flowers of pleasure, etc.). I think that this idea also has a, let us say, European, subliminal aspect, and the tantric context of “ananda.”

And yet the main thing is the third aspect. It seems that in the dynamic color and rhythmic structures created by the artist, there is a lot more that is psychoenergetic, rather than just optical or even metaphorical: to some extent, we are dealing with the transmission of certain infinite vibrations.

Of course, the artist does not require deep, total mediation from the viewer, when senses and the mind are inactive, but he is clearly intending a kind of a psychedelic “tuning” of one’s perception. This third aspect, as I see it, can be described in terms from a theory by Georges Bataille. This theory is the “wasting of energy” as a mechanism of natural and historical processes. The viewer, spellbound by a flower, is drawn into its space and senses the presence of a certain flow of energy, a pillar direction upwards. This is, in the terms of Bataille’s theory, a “cosmically erotic eruption…”

Bekkerman’s third constant subject is angels. The current exhibition may be the first time that the artist’s Angelology is being so widely shown. Of course, in the body of works devoted to this subject, the artist does not have ambitions for the complete representation of the “heavenly hierarchy” (St. Dionysius the Areopagite) and of all “nine angelic choirs.” The host of angels, however, is diverse–there are “Healing Angels,” and “Water Angels,” and “Protectors,” and there are demons.

The art of the 20th century picked up the angelic subject from the symbolists of different waves–from the Pre-Raphaelites to Gustave Moreau, Louis Janmot, and Mikhail Vrubel. And their dramatic intonations caused by the tragic realities of the century were inserted into the subject of the Divine Message–Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus and Bernard Buffet’s Angel of War.

Of course, in his series, Bekkerman aims to find his place in the diversified practice of the representation of Messengers in modernist art. Here he has created his hierarchy, which is not as much a spiritual one as an artistic one. The quality of honesty, always valued in this kind of art, has served as the artist’s “pass” to it.

The artist is indifferent to the provocative concepts of angelology common in contemporary art, such as Giorgio Agamben’s “theological genealogy of economics and government.” Bekkerman’s Angels in the conceptual aspect represent some very simple, traditional things, behind which, however, there are some very personal life experiences. Angel of Peace, Healing Angel, and Arrival—the essence of Good News of the existence of goodness in our world, of its inescapability “no matter what.” Of course, this message is effective provided that there is an independent and large-scale visual painted representation. The sacred is represented by the attrition of the material aspects of the images. In this process, there is an analogue of what is called “epiphanic” (Alexander Schmemann) in theological language.

There are no ecstatic states, no insights, no trances. Moreover, the artist allows himself to not reject even the elements of the grotesque; in any case, his stretched out, mirage figures have both a distinct look and a personality.

And all of the angel- (and man-) shaped subjects attract a kind of amalgamation of the material and coloristic and the ethereal and spiritual. In his latest works (New Angel and others), the artist found a kind of twist to the subject. The visual itself here is tentative and fragile, but the color and surface of the image of the wings refers to something organic that is natural, chitinous, dragonfly-like.

In any case, this subject of illumination brings up closer to the issue that has captivated Bekkerman in the 2000s—the study of various states of consciousness: dream, mythologized, archaic (Dreams and others). These works are awaiting publication, and are principally new approaches and observations.

Reconsidering the entire corpus described aboveall over again, however, Bekkerman’s relatively early works (Flowers, Angels), you understand the necessity of his separate, special publication: he lives his life in which there is a place for reactualization that goes unnoticed in its time and for the birth of new meanings.

Alexander Borovsky

Head of the Department of Contemporary Art

State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg