Chtak’s pictures are like grafitti on the walls of toilet stalls in an
ideal city of the sun populated entirely by midgets, all of them artists or
conceptual poet-politologists. Scraps of paper that look like they fallen from
a mad inventor’s table as he designs a time machine. On countless collections
of beer cans, cigarette packs, labels, screen-on caps, vials, children’s
treasures from the countries of the redeveloped socialist bloc. This is
something we can focus on. It has become hard to imagine that anyone would have
been interested in collecting things produced in editions of billions, but
children then didn’t care for exclusive commodities. The most important thing
was instant recognizability. The most consistent collectors would turn their
homes into tidied-up garbage dump, entire walls filled with empty boxes and
soda cans. And that was mindbogglingly beautiful.
Chtak never liked rarities, “exclusive goods” or piecework. Wandering
through the dump, he collects everything he can carry and then uses this
garbage to build up an army of toothy dwarves, armed with mops, forcing them to
march in rank and file. His garbage dump is probably the world’s biggest, like
that spot somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The water’s surface is covered by a
layer of garbage as far as the eye can see. You can find the entire range of
plastic wrappers, bags, cans, bottles; this is where the tides bring all those
things that won’t go under. Garbage will look good for years if it is made of
plastic. A blinding multicolored carpet, repeating the movement of the ocean’s
waves, spreading all the way past the horizon.
Chtak steers his raft deep into this continent of garbage on an aimless
drift. There are massive quanitities of everything he needs at a hand’s reach.
He isn’t looking for anything special; a lot of the time, what the things he
fishes out and puts it in his pocket are kitsch. A toothy skull, a pack of
smokes, a shoestring, lighters of all colors, another skull, but a different
one. And then he finds some pop idol or
radical youth leader from the Seventies, and he never liked his ideas
though he liked his hat. A tape player floats by, emitting sharp guttural
sounds. You might mistake this for trash-metal, but Chtak knows better: it’s
grindcore. The honesty and self-sacrifice with which he crams all this stuff
into his pockets is astonishing. He consciously collects only those things that
have gone into mass production, things that have lost their meaning. Everything
that is grey, run down to the point of falling apart, everything we are sick
off. When all these finds come together, chaos ensues. Really, this is the term
that fits best. This is what he gives to those art lovers that come to exhibition
openings in search of something “original” and new. They are ready to tear the
artist to pieces, to drink all his blood. But that isn’t going to happen to
Chtak. Because, guys, he doesn’t have anything for you. All he has is chaos,
which he reproduces massively and endlessly.
Chtak reproduces chaos, and by doing so, he orders it. He introduces
order without imposing form. His painting is rather on the side of formlessness
and incompleteness. Every painting has a void, an unmarked space, the paintings
aren’t fully populated. They are in a state of becoming, and continue to
develop even after he has already painted them. Chtak constantly slips away and
eludes finished forms; in fact, he’s a prime example of an artist-bum who starts
lots of projects and never finishes anything. Maybe that’s why his pictures
look like rantings and ravings, but not sick or senile ravings, but the
cheerful ravings of an aggressive schizophrenic, a text that “invokes that
oppressed bastard race that ceaselessly stirs beneath dominations, resisting
everything that crushes and imprisons.”* Or, as the author says, “It’s cool to
go off.”
Alexei Buldakov
March 2009
*Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical. (London: Verso 1998), p.
4
