Aneta Georgievska -Shine
Department of Art History and Archaelogy
University of Maryland

The death of painting has been proclaimed and lamented over the last few decades to the point of becoming one of the more tired clichés in art criticism. At the same time, regardless of the weight of critical history inscribed on easels, each new generation of artists seems to bring within itself those intent upon exploring the confines of stretched canvas and pigment in their studios. Frequently, this search for the new in something so unequivocally old, especially when the result is not a “loud cry” against the past, is labeled traditional, whatever meaning that term may convey for the writer and the viewer. Common usage of this epithet, though, clearly suggests a kind of deficiency, rather than a mark of creative accomplishment.

One of the present-day believers in the orthodox medium of oil on canvas is Shahin Shikhaliyev. Restricting himself to the most canonical tools associated with Western painting, Shikhaliyev creates works often indebted to highly academic genres, such as the still life. A glass or two placed at a table, a chair bathed in daylight, or an oil-lamp casting its modest glow in a quiet interior, are recurring classical motifs in many of his compositions. Unapologetic in the simplicity of their subject matter, these images, nonetheless, thwart the expected critical response by their intricate pictorial language that is neither truly representational, nor quite abstract.

Shikhaliyev’s absorption with formal simplicity and the liminal area between realism and abstraction is particularly pronounced in a series of recent paintings dominated by palettes of particular intensity, such as various shades of green and yellow. Similarly to his earlier works, these paintings are characteristically sparse with regard to “things depicted.” For all of their compositional and tonal plainness, however, they exude not a sense of tranquility, but of an unstoppable inner motion. In these images, the nature morte pedigree acts as a paradoxical counterpoint to the forceful brushstrokes and crusty paint layers that build their surfaces. Thus they exist as some still-life fictions whose theme is, above all else, the surge of gesture towards representation.

Talking to the painter about his choices of subject matter and pictorial manner, it becomes evident that his reliance on seemingly old paths is not motivated by some self-consciously theoretical stance. Rather, it is a kind of necessity arising from his complex understanding of the nature of perception itself. For him, the most humble and tried of artistic motifs – such as a cup of tea – can speak (perhaps most clearly) of the inner dynamics of the process of looking at, and thinking about things, as well as the challenge inherent in the translation of this sensory and intellectual understanding to a work of art.

With this understanding of reality, nothing is truly simple. Nor does the fact that some of Shikaliyev’s works recall modes of painting enshrined in art history seems to cause the artist an excessive concern. The way the artist deals with the perennial problem of originality and imitation, the conscious (or unconscious) invocation of tradition is merely a consequence of his position at the tail end of countless attempts by earlier practitioners of his art who had addressed similar questions about the nature of representation.

Among the past inquiries into the relationship between reality and the art of painting, Shikhaliyev finds a certain appeal in those of Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the great poets and theoretical voices of the Parisian avant-garde. He wrote prolifically, on painters as varied as Picasso and Chagall, praising them for bringing a new truthfulness to the art of painting. This was a visual truth claimed and created by the artist through a thorough transformation of the perceptible in his consciousness. The principle metaphor for this generative process was light – understood both as the highest of all natural phenomena, and a conduit to spiritual enlightenment.

While Shikaliyev’s search for reality in painting is not to be equated with this quasi-Platonic metaphysics, the suggestive play between clarity of forms and their slow obliteration does recall Apollinaire’s musings on the potency of visual signs to evoke the texture of life:

This little painting where there is a cart which reminded me of the day
A day made out of pieces of mauves yellows blues greens and reds…

The version of reality presented in Shikaliyev’s paintings is of a similarly allusive nature. Objects are but reminders, their fluctuating countenance a starting point towards an investigation of a past event, or series of events that have led to their appearance on the surface. This internalized process of painting and, in turn, mode of looking necessary for approaching the artist’s intent, resembles meditation. Even the palette of many of Shikaliyev’s recent works, whose intense hues are allowed to clash with one another, seems to echo that “lived experience,” akin to the opening of perception that, as Appollinaire would note in another poem, happens through the ecstatic play of color:

From red to green all the yellow dies away…
The window opens like an orange
The lovely fruit of light