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Monkey or Man
There is a story by Franz Kafka in which an ape makes a speech to an educated audience. Although it is a speech, it is also a test where the ape must show not only that he may speak the same language as those in the audience but he must also depict their manners to be allowed entry into their society. Iliya Chichkan's paintings depict a subject that is not altogether far from Kafka's own story of the ape as a metaphor for the individual, who, despite the charades of his civilized state, remains a primate. In this and in past work, Chichkan is drawn to the subject lodged somewhere in-between, be it in the photographs of his bejeweled mutants in Sleeping Princes, or the portraits of patients of schizophrenia in Portraits of Abstract Realism. Within this and other work, the artist does so not to convey some state of alienation endemic to the split between conscious and unconscious as in Edvard Munch's The Scream. Instead, Chichkan approaches the inanimate within humankind - the deadness, the android, even the primal, to emphasize constructed deviation as an activation of the individual rather than emptiness, as a "pops-apocalyptic" probe into the state of things. Marta Kuzma |