Pavel Sherbaum. A couple of words to Dima Ikonnikov about his pictures. Catalogue 2001

I like black and white films. I liked very much the old black and white TV before it became splendidly colourful. I like gazing at black and white reproductions of pictures. You can see better the construction; the plastic task is more obvious, and the composition is more visual. These are your strong points, Dima. You are correct, sharp and solid at that. I would say that you make your pictures like constructing a building, but not of bricks put accurately one to another but the way houses in old Russia were built — beam to beam, good for cold and for heat. Those beams were thoroughly chosen, hanged out, planed and adjusted not to be moved by any disaster. There are great spaces in your pictures but no emptiness. They interact; they are in reciprocity with the object. The scale is inimitable in its grandeur; it is uniquely yours. Do you know that the scale alone can identify your picture? It is very curious. The black and white construction has always something to tell, but it is not a bare description (luckily you are already beyond this sin) it is the pure plastic as you call it or harmony. This is your main task, your personal priority. (It is interesting that our contemporary the perfect colourist Boris Markevitch repeatedly stressed, that objectives of plastic see harmony are more important to him than those of colours). Still back to the colour. It is a language of arts. You possess your own. Your colour is never trite. It is always complex, balanced and very natural from our today’s Russian point of view. I really mean it. You know for sure when to use what — in some spots you may use our Podolsk or St. Petersburg “asphalt” paints, in others only the paints from Holland or France would sound properly for you. You feel the colour; you understand it by taste, by smell, by sound. Therefore you may allow making the colour even more complex. The straight colour is very rare with you. It never is straight in our life. Your choice of colours makes the surface of your pictures complex, textured, with leakage and drops, with bulging strokes of your brush, and the thinnest glazing. The surface in your pictures isn’t a cake-creamy skin of soapy silicone girls from billboards. It is more like leather that was salted, tanned, bitten by winds, time and fate, with scars, cuts and bruises. Your surface is lustreless, rough, full of splinters. You are great at making all these cuts and splinters, as if you throw a knife into a tree with your back turned to it. Bang! The bull’s eye! Your look will never slide; it’ll get stuck and stopped. Finally the spectator’s heart is throbbing: “This is what the artist is speaking about!” But it is not enough for you. You add some texts, some words into your pictures. I wonder if our interest in beautiful combination of words and pictures comes from Pushkin diaries or from graffiti on fences. I can’t judge. Of course the first one would be more flattering. Your text is placed beautifully, does not interfere with anything but helps the composition. It brings us back to the surface, which has no holes and can’t be destroyed. But the space positioning and breathing are there. The text in the pictures is not an inscription but “the word to”. More often the words in your pictures are not wise quotations but diary notes. They are not consistent. They are about different things. And of course they are about you. The words add an amazingly unique atmosphere to your canvases. This atmosphere is mystically calmed, ironic, irrational like the look of a talented artist of senses who “has covered the half of his earthly life” and so on, see Dante. But the main point is not in these texts. You have few of them. I think the point is not in the space either, the space with its partly thought through illogicality or absence of any logic. Such a thought through or may be regulated by feelings breach of the rules leads to some mystery and irony of the whole atmosphere. One wants to examine the picture and be absorbed in thinking. The reticence here is not of accidental nature. For the one who is aware (this is the one who is capable to see or feel and for me it is the same or come together) it is enough. One stands still and enjoys the meeting of something clever and kind. Such meetings are rare nowadays. By the way, Dima, all your characters take from you. It’s a pity I was not the first to notice it. And it can’t be otherwise with such soul openness in your pictures. Everything in them is about you. That is why it touches. It is done in such a way and it is all about you. Hence your pictures are about us as well, about our life as it is, not an imaginary one, but the lived through. I am sick and tired of speculative conceptions like “Fish on the fur”. Oh, no! Everything is very simple. One should simply live as you do, like the paper and the paints as you do, love your Tanyka and Dashka, Alik and Danila, enjoy the pipes and good tobacco, good tea and the rest of the world as you do. You do like a heart to heart talk especially with a glass or two. But you are inclined to talk shop and not to have a spiritual exchange. You prefer to discuss colours, drawing, construction and space. You may be engaged into a conversation about poetry and music, but the main thing for you is your profession. You are a professional, a master. You are a true great artist. I love you, Dimka Ikonnikov! Fill the glasses, let’s light up our pipes! That is all.

Pavel Sherbaum
Summer 2001, on holiday