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Dimitri kozyrev november 15 – december 11, 2010
LOST Landscapes
2 front
Cover detail:
LOST EDGE #25, 2008
acrylic and oils on canvas
60” x 48”
right detail:
LOST EDGE #25, 2008
acrylic and oils on canvas
60” x 48”
Dimitri kozyrev november 15 – December 11, 2010
Lost Landscapes
130 lincoln avenue, Suite d, Santa fe, nM 87501 | p (505) 983-9555 | f (505) 983-1284
www.davidrichardContemporary.com | [email protected]
GalleRy DirectoRs
david eichholtz & richard Barger
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Until recently, henri Bergson and
gilles deleuze’s complementary theories of
the virtual have had very little scholarly or
critical application to the visual arts, partic-
ularly painting. this is hardly surprising giv-
en henri Bergson’s early antipathy towards
the analytic, ‘scientific’ Cubism of modern-
ists such as Braque, Picasso and gris, which
he dismissed, along with cinema, as a static
and distortingly linear euclidean spatializa-
tion of the real experience of durée, which
he more accurately described as an internal,
qualitative multiplicity of pure intuition that
defied both segmentation and traditional
distinctions between virtual and actual,
memory and objective matter. instead, in
Creative evolution, Bergson called for a phi-
losophy of science where the philosopher
will see “the material world melt back into
a simple flux, a continuity of flowing, a be-
coming.” 2
in many respects, the works of
russian-born dimitri Kozyrev can be read
as an attempt to update and revitalize this
stalled Cubistic debate by paradoxically
making the fragment itself – obviously
anathema to Bergson - the vehicle for a di-
rect access to time as a manifestation of
incommensurable difference. for example,
in the early (2001-3) “lost landscapes”
and “Black Square” series, Kozyrev’s sun-
drenched Southern California topographies
expressed a specifically deleuzian (and
by extension, Bergsonian) sense of time
and space: clear-cut euclidian geometries
were subverted in favor of a more hyper-
bolic, ‘autopian’ trajectory, as if the world
were viewed from a speeding automobile
or airplane cockpit, or through the splin-
tered, kaleidoscopic fragments of shattered
glass. in other words, Kozyrev employed a
fluidly dynamic painterly vocabulary along-
side montage-like segmentation in order
to deny the spectator the comforts of a
1. gilles deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. richard howard, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 154.
2. henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. arthur Mitchell, lanham, Md: University Press of america, 1983, p. 369.
It is the work of art that produces within itself and upon itself its own effects, and is filled with
them and nourished by them: the work of art is nourished by the truths it engenders. – Gilles
Deleuze .1
Deleuze, Cubism and the becoming of
durée: crystallized space and Bergsonian
flux in the paintings of Dimitri Kozyrev
by Colin Gardner
Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara
3
sustaining visual ground. occasionally, we
were encouraged to focus on a specific
detail but more often than not Kozyrev de-
territorialized our perception, as our mind
was quickly caught up in the overall ‘line of
flight’ of anticipating what is yet to come,
grasping the immediate moment in our pe-
ripheral vision, or recalling what we have
just witnessed in our virtual memory, as if
simultaneously viewing the world through
a rear view mirror. thus, for Kozyrev as for
Bergson, “duration is the continuous prog-
ress of the past which gnaws into the future
and which swells as it advances. and as the
past grows without ceasing, so also there is
no limit to its preservation.” 3
Kozyrev attempted to express this
middle ground between objective specific-
ity and subjective incommensurability by
representing the gaps in our attention rath-
er than the concrete object or landscape
per se. thus in this body of work details are
sketched in - a line of trees, a rough hori-
zon line, the receding lines of street lamps,
a curved section of freeway - so that topog-
raphy is reduced to a series of minimalistic
signifiers. instead of a picturesque or pan-
oramic spectacle, we are made more aware
of vast expanses of cool, billboard-like col-
ors which “invade” the scene so that it is
often difficult to discern the dividing line
between nature and simulacrum, sky and
earth, foreground and background, aerial
view and ground-level perspective. this
constantly shifting spatial dynamic under-
mines the cone-of-vision, single point per-
spective of the traditional landscape so that
we are caught in a cubistic spatial limbo,
unsure whether we are in virtual or actual
space. the result is a collapse of linear or
chronological time into overlapping shards
of active memory, in which past (or more
accurately, the virtual, which for Bergson
contains the sum aggregate of all pasts),
present and future collapse into pure durée.
in “all is Well,” a subsequent series
of diptychs, Kozyrev applied similar prin-
ciples to his appropriation of 1920s avant-
garde historical sources. drawing upon the
Cubo-futurist, Constructivist and Supre-
matist design principles of his native rus-
sia as well as the utilitarian pragmatism of
the german Bauhaus, Kozyrev juxtaposed
these modernist tropes with a vermeer-like
dutch interior or the depiction of a ruined
bunker in finland, exploding the images’
specifically avant-garde contextual logic
into a postmodern pastiche of histori-
cal culture, folding together the legacy of
16th-century mercantilism with the brutal
effects of mechanized warfare (it’s no ac-
cident that camouflage was invented during
World War one by a painter, guirand de
Scevola, modeling its optical effects on les-
sons learned from Cubism). in this way, ev-
ery picture becomes grist for the painter’s
cubistic mill, acting as building blocks in a
Occasionally we are en-
couraged to focus on a
specific detail but more
often than not Kozyrev
deterritorialized our
perception
3. Ibid., p. 4.
4
new constructivist aesthetic, in which any-
thing can be juxtaposed against anything
else, and in which genealogical history
dies in order to be reborn as pure produc-
tion, as pure painting. thus even a series of
Malevich-like monochromatic squares lose
their Suprematist, trans-rational theoretical
origins and become another form of mental
landscape, isolated cogs in a much larger,
untotalizable artistic machine, a machine of
pure resonance.
in this respect, Kozyrev’s method
closely resembles that of Marcel Proust,
particularly in their common use of trans-
versal trajectories that bridge the gaps
across and between seemingly autonomous
spatio-temporal entities. a transversal is a
passage without interval that affirms a spe-
cific difference, all the better to disclose the
essence of time that underpins all apparent
artistic “unities.” thus, in his two most recent
series, “lost edge” and “lost one,” Kozyrev
creates transverse intersections between
actual, physical landscapes – particularly
those ravaged by war - man-made military
structures and architectures, and their cor-
responding mental equivalents, blurring the
distinction between material and immate-
rial. once again his main building block is
the fragment, or perhaps more accurately,
the ruin. it is significant, for example, that
in Proust, the little patch of yellow wall that
young Marcel admires in vermeer’s View of
Delft becomes a greater manifestation of
the essence of art-as-time than the picture
as a whole, instigating an implicating series
of signs and correspondences that reach
across linear time and space. thus, as de-
leuze points out, “the dragons of Balbec,
the patch of wall in the vermeer, the little
phrase of vinteuil, mysterious viewpoints,
tell us the same thing as Chateaubriand’s
wind: they function without ‘sympathy,’
they do not make the work into an organic
totality, but rather each acts as a fragment
that determines a crystallization.” 4
Kozyrev employs this crystalliza-
tion to implicate and critique both past
and current totalitarian regimes (most sig-
nificantly the U.S.S.r. under Stalin), their
policies of militarist expansionism and
their tendency to co-opt and/or censor all
avant-garde movements into an overriding
ideological purview. “lost edge” thus has a
double register, connoting the blunting of
the cutting edge of the avant-garde in both
its artistic and military definitions, raising
the question of whether this edge can ever
be re-honed and sharpened for future cre-
ative use. Kozyrev achieves this transversal
connection between avant-gardes through
manifest and latent reference to an aggre-
gate of spatial fragments that interlock and
imbricate each other like cogs and gears
LOST EDGE #22, 2008,
48” x 60” acrylic and oils on canvas
4. deleuze, Proust and Signs, p. 115.
5
in an elaborate machine. thus we see allu-
sions to Malevich’s early, iconic pictures of
peasant women (c. 1912), which represent
an uneasy fusion of neo-primitive style with
Cubism and futurism, the Cubo-futurist
masterpiece, The Knife Grinder (1912-13)
and the then infamous Black Square of 1915.
these early utopian references resonate
in juxtaposition with ruins of the fortifica-
tions of the Mannerhiem line, which, like its
more famous equivalent, the Maginot line
in france, was built to protect finland from
the advances of its bellicose neighbor, in this
case the Soviet military avant-garde. like
all such attempts at clear cut demarcation,
finland’s attempt at self-defense proved
impotent in the face of modern techniques
of warfare (Blitzkrieg, like Shock and awe,
paid no lip service to the linear bulwarks of
bunkers and trenches, no matter how so-
phisticated) and today the fortifications lie
in ruins, reclaimed by nature as they have
become progressively overgrown by weeds
and grasses.
interestingly, this model of the
vegetal is perhaps the work’s metaphorical
saving grace, for although it alludes to an
intrinsic and inevitable degeneration and
co-option within both areas of the avant-
garde, it is also a driving force of art’s po-
tential renewal, for, as in Proust and Berg-
son, the machine of eternal decay is also
proof positive of the forced movement of
time, and, by extension, the creative force
field of durée. like Proust, Kozyrev com-
bines the idea of death with a dilation of
time in which the fragment or ruin becomes
the self-determined producer of resonanc-
es that transcend historical specificities. a
broken fence, the silhouette of a german
steel helmet, giant shards of concrete, jag-
ged Suprematist geometries (as if el lissitz-
ky’s sparring squares and wedges had been
torn asunder by an unforgiving shredder),
the bared skeleton of a looming Modern-
ist edifice, a wintry landscape – all collapse
together as an assemblage of difference(s),
where time is dilated as if viewed through
a telescope. “Such a work,” says deleuze,
“having for subject time itself, has no need
to write [or, in this case, paint] by apho-
risms: it is in the meanders and rings of an
anti-logos style that it makes the requisite
detours in order to gather up the ultimate
fragments, to sweep along at different
speeds all the pieces, each one of which re-
fers to a different whole, to no whole at all,
or to no other whole than that of style.” 5
a transverse style, one might add, that will
save painting so that it can live on, live to
die yet another death, the better to affirm
the creative evolution of duration itself.
IN...”lost edge”...kozyrev creates transverse inter-
sections between actual, physical landscapes...and
their corresponding mental equivalents...
5. Ibid.
6
LOST EDGE #20, 2008
48” x 60” acrylic and oils on canvas
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LOST EDGE #22, 2008
48” x 60” acrylic and oils on canvas
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LOST EDGE #25, 2008
60” x 48” acrylic and oils on canvas
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LOST EDGE #28, 2009
48” x 48” acrylic and oils on canvas
10
99.999 SErIES #1, 2009
24" x 34" acrylic and oils on canvas
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99.999 SErIES #2, 2009
24" x 34" acrylic and oils on canvas
99.999 SErIES #5, 2009
24” x 34” acrylic and oils on canvas
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BLaCK SqUarE #19, 2002
53.5" x 34.5" acrylic on canvas
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BLaCK SqUarE #20, 2003
41" x 35.5" acrylic on canvas
1414
whITE SqUarE - BLaCK SErIES #23, 2002
48" x 36" acrylic on canvas
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LOST LanDSCaPE #6, 2001
46" x 48" acrylic on canvas
1616
LOST LanDSCaPE #8, 2001
48" x 72" acrylic on canvas
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LOST LanDSCaPE #4, 2000
46" x 48" acrylic on canvas
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LOST LanDSCaPE #10, 2002
44" x 46" acrylic on canvas
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Dimitri Kozyrev
Selected One Person Exhibitions:
2012 Mark Moore gallery, los angeles, Ca
2011 Last One, Benrimon Contemporary, new York, nY
2010 Lost Landscapes, david richard Contemporary, Santa fe, nM
2009 Lost Edge, Mark Moore gallery, los angeles, Ca
2006 golf Coast Museum of art, largo, fl
2005 Cirrus gallery, los angeles, Ca
2004 Journeys II, Cirrus gallery, los angeles, Ca
2003 Drawings, Cirrus gallery, los angeles, Ca
2001 Lost Landscapes, Contemporary arts forum, Santa Barbara, Ca
Selected Group Exhibitions:
2010 Gimme Shelter, Mixed greens gallery, new York, nY
2010 Sites of Memory, Stephan Stoyanov gallery, new York, nY
2010 Made in Tucson, MoCa, tucson, aZ
2009 VIII International Biennale, Museum of Modern art, Krasnoyarsk, russia
2009 Gary h. Brown Collection, University art Museum, UCSB, Santa Barbara, Ca
2009 Trouble In Paradise: tucson Museum of art, tucson, aZ
2009 Fast Forward: Channing Peake gallery, Santa Barbara, Ca
2008 Future Tense: reshaping the landscape, neuberger Museum of art, Purchase, nY
2008 Ben Maltz gallery, otis College, los angeles, Ca
2008 Claremont graduate University, Pomona, Ca
2007 Ultrasonic International II, Mark Moore gallery, los angeles, Ca
2006 F[acts]igures,artwalkamsterdam,amsterdam,netherlands
2005 Incognito, Santa Monica Museum of art, Santa Monica, Ca
2005 Fineline, new Drawings, Cirrus gallery, los angeles, Ca
2004 armory art fair, new York, nY
2004 Contemporary arts forum, Santa Barbara, Ca
2003 road Show, george adams gallery, new York, nY
2003 abstracted, limn gallery, San francisco, Ca
2002 Snapshot, elizabeth leach gallery, Portland, or
2002 Flat Files rendez Vous, Post vs. Pierogi gallery, Post, los angeles, Ca
2001 auxiliary Settings, Cirrus gallery, los angeles, Ca
Publications/Reviews
andrews, Scott. art ltd., “artist Profile”, november, 2010
regan, Margaret. tucson Weekly, “Cities and earth”, July 22, 2010
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featured artist, www.guernicamag.com, “lost edge”, May 2010
featured artist, www.artmargins.com, august 9, 2009
Pagel, david. los angeles times, “the Shapes of Powerlessness”, March 13, 2009
Schwyzer, elizabeth. the independent, “fast forward 2009”, March, 2009
Woodard,Josef. Santa Barbara news-Press,”then and now”, feb.13,2009
frank, Peter. artweek, “looky See” at otis College, october, 2008
valdez, Cynthia. the Magazine-la, Looky See:a Summer Show, october, 2008
Walsh, daniella. the oC register, Taking a Fresh Look at the Land, october 1,2006
green, tyler www.artsjournal.com , Top 10 of 2005, January 2006
frank, Peter. laWeekly, Picks of the week, august 5-11, 2005
green, tyler www.artsjournal.com, around La, June 27, 2005
Pagel, david. los angeles times, Giving Substance to a Virtual world, May 13, 2005
green, tyler www.artsjournal.com, On Miami Scope, december, 2004
green, tyler. www.artsjournal.com, Modern art notes, March 17,2004
Pagel, david. los angeles times, november, 2003
hannum, terence.www.panel-house.com, raid in Chicago,nov., 2003
artner, g. alan. Chicago tribune, all’s fair at ‘art Chicago’, May 10, 2003
Janku richard, laura. artweek, abstract-ed , May, 2003
Myers, holly. los angeles times, reinventing the wheels, feb.28, 2003
Pagel, david. los angeles times, September, 2002
Crowder, Joan. SB news-Press, Faculty on Display, May 3, 2002
Miles, Christopher. artforum, Critic’s picks, february, 2002
Pagel, david. los angeles times, Kozyrev Details the Open road at hurtling Speed,
Jan.19,2002
gipe, lawrence. the independent, On the road with Dimitri, May 31, 2001
new american Paintings: Mfa edition. 2000
Honors and Awards
2008 iv Painting Prize Castellon County Council(finalist), Spain
2005 art omi residency
2000 abrams Prize, University of California, Santa Barbara
1999 levitan fellowship, University of California, Santa Barbara
1999 KCBx graduate art fellowship, University of California, Santa Barbara
Education:
2000 University of California, Santa Barbara, Mfa in Studio arts
1997 ohio University, Bfa in Painting
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iSBn 978-0-9827872-4-3
PriCe $15.00
© 2010 david riChard ConteMPorarY, llC
130 lincoln avenue, Suite d, Santa fe, nM 87501 | p (505) 983-9555 | f (505) 983-1284
www.davidrichardContemporary.com | [email protected]