VALENTIN POPOV
Prince of Pop Baroque
By Rick Gilbert
Applying his self-styled philosophy of “romantic cynicism”, Valentin Popov fuses opposites of sign, symbol and mood. Bringing to bear the sensibility of a Russian mystic, a medieval allegorist and a post-modern aesthete, he is apt to treat Batman as the centerpiece of a religious altar, replete with hagiographic episodes from the life of the saint; contrive sweeping, large-scale emblems such as Life, with its pair of goggle-eyed Victorian< toddlers gazing wonderingly upon a dripping hourglass; or to mix collage with assemblage in Leonardo-like notebooks of wax, metal, leather strips, handmade paper, inscriptions, images of fish, birds, 19th century dignitaries and Rembrandt imitations. With his unique blend of technical mastery and ideological innovation, Popov is a distinctly satisfying artist whose work is hauntingly evocative.
Looking at the products of Valentin Popov’s artistic imagination is like watching one of those old cartoons where the inmates of the toyshop come alive at night and roam abroad. Unlike the toyshop, however, where everything is neatly back in place the next morning, the characters in Popov’s case are not toy soldiers and teddy bears but figures from art history, their playground is an art museum, and the next morning their costumes and identities are hopelessly mixed up in a jumbled confusion of periods and styles held over from the preceding night’s orgiastic masquerade of reckless debauchery.
Popov, himself a product of traditional art education in the former Soviet Union, spent long years mastering conventions in the Academy of Art in the Ukraine. Equally expert at painting, etching, collage, photography, sculpture, and installation, Popov often mixes media within genres, and is as comfortable emulating Russian religious icons as he is contriving kitschy decorative imagery suitable for Liberace’s dining room. Borrowing liberally from the greatest imagery in the classical canon, Popov practices a method of appropriation, adaptation, and transformation where he puts familiar images to unfamiliar uses or indulges in extremely novel exercises in technique. As a master engraver, he has done exquisite linocuts and monotypes based on classical literature and, as an extension of this skill, paints on aluminum using his brush as a stylus!
Formulated during the years he lived in the U.S.S.R., Popov’s pet theory of “Romantic Cynicism” is a dualist, manichaean philosophy blending the romantic ideals of an eternally optimistic socialist utopia which was the Soviet Union with a personal sense of cynicism about life’s drearier realities. “In the former U.S.S.R.,” Valentin explains, “everyone was supposed to love one another and help one another achieve the common good, by each taking according to his needs and giving according to his abilities.” Popov’s large-scale painting First the Apple...Then Us , with its portrait-of-the-artist-as-worm emerging from a plump, ripe, red apple set in the foreground of a swampy prehistoric landscape, embodies the philosophy of Romantic Cynicism in its linkage of innocence and corruption, deceptive appearances, and twilight on the flimsy edifice of human “big ideas”, hopes and aspirations. Though his work often takes this form of comic surrealism, Popov is deadly serious about his vision of the world as a rotten apple with subversive spoilage gnawing at its core. His yin-yang view of the positive-negative nature of existence is reflected by artworks in which he links all manner of polar opposites to create what he calls “electric power circuits”.
Perhaps no segment of Popov’s oeuvre is more “romantically cynical” than his Saint Batman series. An episodic satire three years in the making, the series eventually involved more than 100 pieces. Loosely patterned after the life of Christ, Batman, in Popov’s take, is a figure fashioned from fragments of popular mythology, religious lore, and created pseudohistory. Popov artworks have depicted Batman as Columbus, Batman in Egypt, Batman as the subject of invented 19th century-style engravings. Batman is considered as an immortal, seen in diverse parts of the globe in every century. Batman’s roots are endlessly examined in a cycle of falsified religion and myth extending from his supposed childhood and youth through his ultimate crucifixion and possible resurrection. The series culminated with a performance piece in which Popov had himself crucified in a Batman costume, documented the event with the help of assistants, then made a plaster cast of the martyr from a living model. These tributes were followed by the issuance of a Batman death mask postage stamp. Popov explains his concept of Batman as a savior in a world where beliefs are so muddled and the presence of God is so elusive that people want to retreat into a childhood mentality where everything is good or evil, black or white. Batman comes to the rescue whenever he is summoned. A simplistic, cartoon icon from American pop culture, Popov combines Batman with the serious tradition of Christ, mankind’s savior, and the whole concomitant tradition in art. Popov portrays Batman as Cupid leaving the bed of Psyche, Batman as Frederick the Great, Batman as the namesake of an engraving titled Heroism at the End of the 20th Century.
Popov is big on the notion of heroes and heroism. Not only is he enthralled with the recurring heroes of art history such as Jesus, Saint George,< Napoleon and Mickey Mouse, he is also concerned with the idea of the artist as hero and with masks, since masks are worn by everyone, heroes and artists most of all. Saint Batman is a sort of amalgam of all these obsessions, a masked crusader who is around to ensure that mankind keeps its moral balance. Popov’s favorite philosopher is Nietzche, creator of the Superman concept as well as the concept of a moral state of being “beyond good and evil”. Popov’s own preoccupation with morality is expressed in his huge, lushly painted mock Victorian moral allegories. Looking like vintage valentines or enamel cover art for turn-of-the-century candy tins, these feature the seashore frolics of guileless, goo-goo-eyed children dressed in sailor suits and sun bonnets captioned with didactic inscriptions like “Nothing dries as fast as tears...” or “Familiarity breeds contempt...and children”. In one, a boy is about to launch a toy boat in a real ocean; in another, Cupid has been shot in the back with one of his own arrows. Twisted parables paradoxically framed, they make for a weird fusion of early commercia advertising illustration and pure Dada.
Turning again to the theme of artist as hero, Popov’s Rembrandt fixation must not be overlooked. Perhaps no one in art history better exemplifies the suffering artist than Rembrandt. At one point in his career, unable to pay for his paintbrushes, forced by economic factors to live with his parents until well into middle age, alternately celebrated, vilified and misunderstood by a fickle public, Rembrandt is the classic of his type. Little wonder that Popov has embraced Rembrandt as an icon when the two artists have so much in common. Both are analytical, emotional, psychological painters concerned with dramatic effects. Both treat themes from classical mythology, Christian legend, and ancient history. Both are fond of layering their oils and their inks, and both consistently experiment with technique. Popov says he frequently tries to understand what Rembrandt felt when he painted his famous self-portraits. As for Popov, it is probably no exaggeration to say that he could be the foremost Rembrandt forger in the world today, if he chose. One recent show hung real Rembrandt etchings alongside Popov’s and they were indistinguishable. Popov’s Rembrandt replicas crop up like measles in his elegant collages, which are structured from hand-made papers while the pulp is still wet, and combine etchings and Rembrandt-like exercises in acrylics and oils with strokes of abstract minimalism. Interestingly enough, Salvador Dali tried to do similar etchings in his old age, but wasn’t able to pull it off with anywhere near as much flair.
Because of his background in printmaking and fine book illustration, Popov’s relationship with paper is astounding. He endows paper with a secret vitality, bringing it to life like a Frankenstein monster made from bits and pieces salvaged from every corner of art history and shot through with an electrical charge provided by several techniques harnessed simultaneously. A typical Popov work on paper consists of a single sheet compartmentalized into about thirty individual artworks all stitched together, figuratively speaking, in one complex quilt. There are Rembrandt knock-offs in the form of cameo portraits, faces from Roman coins, windmills, umbrellas, birds, palm trees, historic buildings, snatches of landscape, drip painting, arbitrary diagonal brushstrokes left raw like saber slashes, Latin and asian letters, postage stamps, etchings taken out of context, gauze, grommeted holes, squares of celluloid or lucite pinned in place, theater tickets, scraps of wallpaper, pages torn from vintage encyclopedias, Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg compositional flourishes thrown in for the sheer delight of alluding to those points on the modernist map.
Not only can he paint like everyone from Cranach the Elder to Velasquez, Popov is also presently experimenting with abstract sculpture and non-representational grid collage, as well as such oddities as hand-painted lacquer boxes whose Rusian folk motifs of ballerinas, unicorns, and errant knights are likely to be emblazoned with bat signals or other Popov trademarks. Popov’s classical training has endowed him with tools and technical strengths often missing from the contemporary Western art scene, while American pop culture and the whole lineage of post 1920s avant-garde art proscribed in the former Soviet Union where he spent his formative years, but which he can now freely assimilate, has given him a vast playing field for intellectual and artistic development, and has enabled him to synthesize a unique vision of the old and the new, of the corny, sentimental, and moralistic and the campy, ironic, sneaky, and surreptitious. Perhaps an appropriate tag for this vision is “pop baroque”, inasmuch as it fuses elements characteristic of both these widely disparate schools.
Even though Russia was, during half of the twentieth century, isolated into a sort of aesthetic Galapagos, cut off from artistic developments in much of the rest of the world, artists like Valentin Popov have managed to evolve hybrid products unlike anything anyone else is doing. While fellow emigres Komar and Melamid, using high-handed methods of presentation, mockingly glamorize or debunk past symbols of Soviet socialism, especially political personages, Popov brings to bear the same sort of technical virtuosity to create images which explore the psychology underlying this human need for leaders, martyrs, or any other sort of heroes. Popov is a canny investigator of the visual environment, keenly attuned to its subtleties. He knows that if Batman could be summoned by such ordinary means as a phone call or a telegram, it wouldn’t have half the intrigue or impact of the “bat signal” projected onto a fleecy cumulus cloud above Gotham City. An astute observer of the visual environment’s codes and cues, Popov continues to carry out the artist’s own heroic mission of ambushing an unsuspecting public with a searchlight trained on the hidden messages in our own horizons.