Ivan Bazak | Stillleben

Interest in history usually stirs whenever one somehow no longer quite knows how things might go on. Perhaps this is the starting point for the new series of paintings that Ivan Bazak has spread out across the rooms of Galerie Charim. On view are large-format canvases whose motifs are exclusively book covers. To go with them he has set up a kind of reading lounge, presenting numerous books and pamphlets on various displays. The copies that served as models for the paintings can also be found there and may be leafed through or, if need be, studied. All the books come from the estate of a former student at Frankfurt University who completed his philosophy studies there towards the end of the 1960s, under Adorno among others. Viewers are therefore called upon, or perhaps better invited, to embark on a journey through time and to question anew, against the backdrop of the present, these worn, well-thumbed and underlined printed products of a turbulent era. The selection of books is thoroughly exemplary in character. Alongside the classics Marx, Lenin and Mao, there are also works by Karl Korsch, Plekhanov and Spartak Beglov. Part of the fascination that this trove is able to exert on Ivan Bazak perhaps stems from the fact that some of the writings were still part of the school reading of the artist, who was born in Ukraine in 1980. For the 1968 movement, by contrast, as rediscoveries they served as a transmission belt. The reception of already existing theoretical traditions, predominantly of a Marxist hue, was clearly to the fore, since it was above all the dynamics of an intellectual search that around 1968 released surges of radicalisation, innovation and differentiation. In a breathtaking succession, theorems were taken up, rehearsed, tried out for consistency with the political situation, rejected and discarded again. The horizon of social change was to remain open.

With his copies, by contrast, Bazak quite markedly changes the state of aggregation of the images, appropriating words and images that may not belong to him. The changed mediality accordingly also alters their modality, and so their legitimacy can and must be renegotiated. Naturally, this shift of context also affects the place where these images are put on display. The private and the public seem to permeate each other. The representational realism with which Ivan Bazak approaches his repertoire of motifs understands realism as a field determined equally by facts and desires. The social imaginary is accordingly to be seen as an equal part of reality.

It therefore still seems necessary to place artistic work in a social and political context and yet to remain within an autonomous artistic space – for instance, to create a space that the subject can understand as an extension of its own body.

For Ivan Bazak, then, it is not a matter of revolutionising with or in his pictures, but rather of outwitting things a little, loosening them up and thereby making them more mobile, since he still distrusts standardised thinking and speaking. Pictures, by contrast, ultimately have the not inconsiderable advantage of being able to insist on an openness to interpretation. Moreover, they provide a projection surface onto a space in which the real and the imaginary can meet or mingle. Bazak’s pictures are interwoven with a dialectical intensity. The actual material is, in any case, the images in one’s head. The painterly realisation could therefore be counted as post-production, were it not that the execution itself at times demands a decisive part.

Counter-worlds and places on the sidelines are up for discussion in Bazak’s panel work ‘Still Leben’, raising questions about the utopias, visions and ideologies developed in the past and their fulfilment in the present. Perhaps some of them have already been fulfilled and we simply failed to notice in time, because the image we had of them cannot be reconciled with the form they took on when they were realised. Being modern also means knowing what no longer works. What is to the fore in Bazak’s handling of his source material is less the particular medium used than the urgency of the concern. This aims at a self-determined, critical and creative approach to our symbols, values and role models, combined with an invitation to communicative exchange about ourselves and our world. What is negotiated is knowledge, power and the human being’s becoming a subject. The logic of systems and the universal context of delusion are to be pointedly opposed, and playful spaces for open human interaction with one another demanded. In the midst of a world of agreed-upon unambiguities, Ivan Bazak, with his second look at consumed and often forgotten images, maintains contact with things beyond the antithesis of usefulness and uselessness. This look could, however, also denote the ability to reveal and play through surprising connections and unexpected cross-references, including from the stock of history, with a view to their artistic yield. After all, Bazak knows only too well that without a literal and metaphorical outside we cannot bear our literal as well as metaphorical inside. Bazak’s artistic strategy of roaming, associative research lends the pictures the propulsive speed of thoughts, with the exhibits deployed as rhetorical dummies. As the already invoked Adorno put it: “As purely made, manufactured things, artworks are instructions for the praxis from which they abstain: the production of right life.”

Harald Uhr