Scars of biography in engraving
Review of Georgy Khazankin exhibition Deep Pressure at the Maksim Bokser Gallery /
On view till March 1
Riga’s Maksim Bokser Gallery is hosting an exhibition of Ukranian artist Georgy Khazankin Deep Pressure. Born in Odessa, Khazankin studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. After Russia’s intervention in Ukraine began, he left with his beloved, also artist Vera Trofimova for Budapest. His biography is a typical dramatic case of how war tears cultural ties and makes people irrelevant in any country. Khazankin carries these traumatic themes into his art, which sits on the edge of figurativeness and psychedelic abstraction or even op-art. Maxim Boxer’s gallery shows about fifteen prints in a complex technique and a movie about their unique creation with the help of an asphalt paver.
Georgy Khazankin. Thermal engraving, rubbered paper, typographic ink 33х40cm. 2021.
From the "Spineless Morning" series
Why is the exhibit called Deep Pressure? As a curator, it was important for me to understand the interaction between the image and the psychic energy that gives birth to the image. The phrase is not just a metaphor. It refers to the technique of printing engravings. Traditionally, the phrase “deep pressure” was applied to techniques like etching, when the printing elements (the actual drawing) were recessed in relation to the whitespace. Georgy Khazankin has turned this concept inside out, showing itspsychic nature.
For the artist, “deep pressure” is first and foremost a performative act that allows him to free himself, at least for a while, from the fears and nightmares that torment us all today. Deep press rhymes with the word “depression”. Khazankin creates his giant prints, more often than not using the letterpress technique (when the drawing is white and the background is filled with paint), with the help of an asphalt paver. The paver becomes a printing press, which makes it possible to make a print of enormous size. For the artist, the pressure of the giant press became a metaphor for transferring his personal drama and sorrows onto fragile paper.
Georgy Khazankin. Thermal engraving, rubbered paper, typographic ink 25х25,8cm. 2021.
From the "Spineless Morning" series
Khazankin broke new ground with so-called thermal printmaking, in which a plate of plastic is melted and the print is produced with a charred, porous texture. The artist says: Since I work in the field of physical and digital, I can be called an interdisciplinary artist. My practice is a combination of expressionism, site-specific, and to some extent minimalism. During my academic years, I fell in love with printmaking techniques and started experimenting. It was important to me to increase the speed and freedom of the process, which eventually became called “thermal engraving”. The sheets presented in Maxim Boxer’s gallery, are made with this technique.
His prints display the squirming and spasms of a traumatized, disheveled form. At the same time they pulsate as pure virtual substance. Familiar images (the automobile, urban flora and fauna, traffic hatches) glow as if under a veil. Only individual bright chords of color break through the veil of sfumato intensely. Engraving, as well as drawing, is a categorically obligatory statement. Painting is always about pretense.
Georgy Khazankin.Thermal engraving, rubbered paper, typographic ink 33х51cm. 2021
From the "Spineless Morning" series
Its nature is dual. It involves the creation of a pictorial illusion, read – a deception – in which the technique is more often concealed in favor of trompe l’oeil. In an engraving or drawing, the line drawn becomes a scar, a burr of the artist’s personal inhabitation of space-time.
A cutter, a needle scratches, carves out the structure of a particular person’s nerve fibers. That is why the technique of engraving was so favored by the expressionists, whose heir to some extent is the Ukrainian artist Georgy Khazankin. Khazankin’s art is close to the theme of object-oriented creativity associated with the enigmatic understanding of reality as the Other, the Alien, which does not fit into our usual experience.
Georgy Khazankin. Thermal engraving, rubbered paper, typographic ink 33х40cm. 2021.
From the "Spineless Morning" series
In addition to engraving techniques, George has an excellent command of ceramics. He now lives with his beloved in Budapest. And this is what he says about this city, which helps him to find his creative self:
Hungary has an excellent heritage of ceramics. The pyrogranite that covers much of the old town, the eosin glaze—emerald blue with a petrol tint—glittering in the windows of many antique stores.
I sink into the memory of my origin and find myself identifying with a solid vessel that acquires its qualities through the scalding heat of the furnace. It calms the hate but doesn’t remove the feeling of emptiness.
Minute of Poetry ends, priorities have switched again, and it’s already much harder to do creative promotion. But we have the support of good people. Our mutual sincerity helps us move forward and do things I thought impossible before.
Georgy Khazankin. Thermal engraving, rubbered paper, typographic ink 23,5х18cm. 2021.
From the "Spineless Morning" series
In different techniques Georgy Khazankin realizes the most complex anatomical dissection of the form, in which personal dramas and confusion, as well as aspirations of freedom, light and peace are imprinted. Being to some extent the heir of the most powerful engravers of the past, Khazankin overcomes egocentrism. It does not coincide with the themes of publicism, diagnosis and prosecutorial judgment. He translates the broken state of the world into the dimensions of perpetual motion, the glow of life in defiance. Balancing on the verge of abstraction and figurativeness, Gregory shows us pulsations in a radiance of dazzling white, in a halo of golden and silver glow. What do we see when we look at a single sheet? A pile of skulls – victims of war, the ossuary of a monastery, or symbolist hosts of unborn souls waiting for their incarnation?
Georgy Khazankin. Thermal engraving, paper, typographic ink. 150x250cm. 2023.
From the "deep rest" series
Khazankin offers no concrete answer. He presents the struggle for life as an emotional outbreak burning our senses, in which, as if in a Borgesian aleph, all results and outcomes are contained.
Georgy Khazankin.Thermal engraving, paper, typographic ink. 150x135cm. 2023.
From the "deep rest" series
