Artists

Archie Chekatouski

Press release

When I first met Archie I thought he said that he comes from the ‘Ballets Russes’. How marvellous! The grand spectacles of Diaghilev and Nijinsky, the ornate costumes of Bakst, returned after one hundred years! What glamour! The mundane reality, Belarus, was a disappointment. But this disappointment, this comic error on my part, and this shortfall between the idealised image and reality is fitting for the artist’s works. Another anecdote: on Instagram Archie posted a picture of a mural he had made, in which he had used all the coloured pens he had available, scribbling with each as if to test they still worked, in a square formation, like swatches but at regular intervals, like a grid. I described it - intending this to be a compliment - as ‘kindergarten Sol Le Witt’. What I’m trying to show is that his practice turns upon modesty, bathetic humour, stupidity and silliness, high art brought down to the ordinary, the anecdotal, even at times the inconsequential or meaningless. His is an art that promises something – a show of abstract paintings – only to deliver on this promise in the most understated ways – the paintings were just pieces of coloured paper stuck onto cheap canvas bought at Flying Tiger. If he released a perfume, it would be called Anticlimax.

You might think this silliness is itself merely a joke at the expense of contemporary art, but stupidity and disappointment are oddly central to the field. Think of Warhol’s dumb repetitions of vapid mass media signs, or his early films in which he documents whatever happens, however mundane and meaningless, until the reel runs out. Then there is what Leo Bersani termed the ‘increasing negation of meaning’ in Rothko’s late work, as his canvas approaches pure presence, devoid of content. There’s even something bathetic in conceptualism: the ever diminishing returns in the gaps between ideal, concept, word, image and thing. Let’s not forget that these high-minded efforts were aimed at democratising art.