From my window

"The language of art grows at the edges, is renewed by the germination of sown marginalia. Chelushkin's proto-drawing founds the anthropological, technocratic and corporeal, using memorable optics. Such a system of optical adjustment brings into focus the maximally decanonized and therefore free images, motifs and mise-en-scenes, replenishing the world of the author's depository. The poetics of misrecognition changes the inertia of our viewing, knocks down the value polarization, cancels the hierarchy of "significant-random". To bring into focus the object needed by the draftsman means to master the mechanism of the viewer's attention, such a function in the film process is performed by a focus puller, or "magician". Based on the point where the focus is brought and mentally finding the source of focus, we discover the artist's position. The intentionality of such a search sets the direction of the "unpainted picture", pushes towards the unrecognized spaces behind the white fields of existing drawings, which turned out to be accessible to the viewer and therefore were appointed the main objects of attention. But they are also marginal in relation to the invisible meaning lying in the blind zone. Kirill Chelushkin so consistently and reliably builds up the map of our world at the edges that its center is already noticeably shifting."

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

Chelushkin's persistence in ignoring the most significant themes or iconic images is striking, how carefully he grows his personal poetics of non-recognition, how consistently he increases the productivity of his marginal fields! It is impossible to find a media face, a recognizable landscape or a homage gesture in his depository. Breaking out of any canons into occasional freedom is a practically impossible task, but captivating, how can one not recall from the greats: "The world caught me, but did not catch me."

Text: Anton Uspensky