Waiting 3. Energetics of accidental

Chelushkin has an absolute ear for gradations of chiaroscuro. You don't have to light a lamp to make the light shine. Light arises from darkness when a skillful hand begins to arrange its tones and gradually a dim and then brighter ray breaks through from this order, as in the engravings of Dore, who masterfully depicted the battles of light and darkness in his biblical cycle. Sensitivity to chiaroscuro gradations allowed Chelushkin to reach a new level of conceptualization of this phenomenon, but in physical reality. Having separated the screen and the light, he himself answers the question he posed in one of his installations: "what did I manage to understand about light and shadow?

The technique of his drawings is simple to the point of archaism: based on the talent of a draughtsman, it is multiplied by gigantic artisanal labor. The space of the drawing literally accumulates, visualizes and translates the energy of expended "man-hours", instantaneous impulses and shortest signals unthinkable for the current time. The artist frantically attacks the canvas, fights with the pencil, holding it according to Filonov's testament: like a carpenter with an axe, so that no one can pull it out.

Chelushkin's insistence on ignoring even slightly significant themes or iconic images is striking, in how carefully he grows his personal poetics of unrecognition, and how consistently he increases the yield of his marginal fields! It is impossible to find a media face, a recognizable landscape, or a homage gesture in its depository. Breaking out of any canons into personal freedom is a task that is practically impossible to solve, but it is fascinating, as one of the great ones cannot remember: "The world tried to caught me, but it did not catch me."

Text: Konstantin Bokhorov, Anton Uspensky.