Art — is you yourself, here you live – you are the art”, what can these mysterious words resembling a slogan or a spell, the words said by one well-known nonconformist mean? At first sight it is natural to find in these words the “Self” primacy of the artist himself, of his personality.It is a domination of “Self” that is usually found in the art of modernism, both by its opponents, and superficial admirers. Notorious “self-expression” is the field where many spears concerning the values of avant-garde have been broken.
However, whether it corresponds to the reality, is it true, that the art of modernism and of its modern adherents puts the “Self” of the artist as of paramount importance of the creative act? For research of this question we shall address to Sergey Filatov’s activity. Examining his biography and creativity, we collide with a curious situation, namely that there is a certain hidden contradiction between the tasks of the artist, the way he formulates them and the real experience of his work.
It is known that Filatov, keen on India and its philosophical and religious doctrines, is the follower of school Shri Ramana Maharshi known also as “Maha-yoga”. In this system the main thing is the question “Who am I?”. Hence Filatov understands his work as the act of self-knowledge, as comprehension of “Self”. All this is too well-known. Such an approach to creativity and to life assumes rejection of “false, rational” western experience in the name of new “spiritual, irrational” eastern experience. But, addressing to the real artist’s practice of Filatov, we notice, that his paintings send us to modernism in its abstract version that is to purely western cultural practice. It is not even necessary to remind, that the east, as a matter of fact, does not know modernism and especially, never generated it, if not consider the influence of the eastern practices on the modernist aesthetics, of course. Well…contradiction? At first sight — yes. Now we’ll try to consider the aesthetic roots of Filatov’s work. As it has been told above, his works are unambiguously abstract. Rare figurative images are too rare, that it could be meaningful to recollect them.
Though, appearing like dreams on the surfaces of Filatov’s paintings and graphic sheets, they bring confusion. In fact the classical abstraction does not know figuration, for it it’s heresy, blasphemy. The artist’s hints on anthropomorphous dream-like forms inside the picturesque fogs send us in the other direction, namely classical surrealism.
In fact, surrealism includes two versions — academic (illusionist) and automatic (abstract). Thus, we find out, that surrealism is heterogeneous as a style. But style is just deprived of the personal beginning; it is far from individual authorship. For this reason Welflinn believes decorative art to be a den of style, and in this case with every reason we can reckon archaic cult practices among it. Here we, probably, find the proof connecting experience of abstract surrealism with experience of eastern comprehension of life, through refusal from individual “Self”. In the basis of classical surrealism the principle of the automatic letter lies, that is the principle which Filatov actively applies. Automatism here, as the competent researcher of modernism Rozalind Krauss writes “is “scribbling”, it is the producing of the visual text”.
The ideologist of surrealism Andre Breton preferred automatism to representation that is spontaneity to mediation. In Filatov’s art, as well as in all surrealistic art, we see traditional for the western consciousness line of fear of representation, as a deceit. The verity of a textual stream of the automatic letter is not so much representing something, than expressing. This visual web takes out in the area of presence – makes it visible – an ingenious experience of what Breton calls “rhythmic unity” and characterizes it, as an “absence of contradictions, removal of the emotional pressure arising from suppression, absence of time sense and replacement of an external reality with a mental reality …”. If to remove the last word-combination from this quotation, we will actually see the description of the state, to which the follower of the oriental teachings aspires.
Coming back to the western discourse we ascertain, that “rhythmic unity”, which makes automatic drawing, is very close to what Freud has named “oceanic feeling” — children’s libido area of pleasure, yet not subordinated to civilization and its requirements. “Automatism” — declares Andre Breton, — “guides us straight to this area”, and he speaks here from the field of unconscious.
Thus, the method professed by Filatov, takes unconscious “oceanic” feeling out to the area of presence. His method remains to be the letter, but it, unlike other modernist strategies, is not representation. It is a kind of presence, direct presence of the internal “Self” of the artist.
This sense of automatism as demonstrations of internal “Self” of the artist, that is that very “Self” to which achievement Maha-yoga aspires, is contained in Breton’s description of the automatic letter, as the uttered idea. Idea is not representation, but something which is the most transparent for consciousness — an ingenious experience, not spotted with the distance and materialization of the signs. The choice of the automatic letter as the art method enables Filatov to carry out synthesis between his own practice and creativity.

Text by Bogdan Mamonov … Read More