ARTICLES
In accordance with their abilities, everybody is guided by his
past experience in life. If the inherited features of character are added to it, we can
get a more or less impartial, objective portrait of a person. For artists all this
together with emotions and feelings is the basis, the ground, the cause and the material
for their creative activities. Alexander Schwarz, like many artists of his generation,
lived through all that was destined to happen due to the turns of the fate of the country
he lived in. He passed through an inevitable avantgardism ordeal (temptation), scandals
and success at his exhibitions, he was blamed for ignoring ideological directives and
lines. And this brought the artist neither happiness nor captious popularity. Because he
was never interested in art staking (counting) on political momentary events, as he
considered social art to be the reverse side of social realism. The fact is that in the
70s he withdrew into himself, went into his own shell and stepped on his long and lonely
way to his maturity as a master. His own individual style elaboration was influenced
greatly by ancient Chinese and Japanese art on the one hand, and Russian icon-painting on
the other. Every nationality has its own aesthetic characteristics of the world and the
icon reflects and expresses the real aesthetic soul of the place where we were born.
Alexander Schwarz studied the Russian icon at first-hand, working and painting at the
Moscow Patriarchy. This experience helped him to solve the problem of time in the picture,
i.e. the problem of the plot and subject in it, which means, to be more exact, its
absence. Because the most terrible sin and harm for a painter is to create a picture
striving after a literary effect, and if it is possible to say - a picture which is
pedagogically correct. The objects having many sides and points of views in icon
influenced in a decisive way the formation of Schwarz's aesthetics. The series of Moscow
cityscapes originates from this, they are created with the help of very stingy, chary and
strict expressive graphic means. Made in cold gray and blue colours, they give the proper
atmosphere of the yards and churches of the Russian capital and no doubt they possess some
concentrated energy. At the same time it is nearly impossible to understand the aesthetic
style of the artist without taking into consideration the influence made by the culture of
"modern" (and not only in fine arts) that appeared at the edge of the centuries.
Here lies the clue to the exquisite, refined and fractured figures of the ladies on his
canvases. As every real artist, Schwarz in his particular way is especially fond of
ladies, who constantly impress him by their plastic perfection. If the line, composition,
in which Alexander Schwarz is especially , strong , express abstract ideas and problems,
the colour to him is in the first place an emotion . It is the colour that gives the
emotional attitude towards the object . And he can explain his "black" period
replaced by unexpectedly bright and colourful works of his last period by emotional
reasons only . The aesthetic attitude of the artist is inseparably linked with his
heightened individualism, without which no intensive creativity can exist. His individual
style, being at the same time non-realistic and non-avant-gard, placed the artist outside
different struggling schools and groups. Of course he is not a realist, in the common
sense of the word, but avant-gard in our days means the easiest way without any pains for
him. Schwarz is alone in his art and this is more than natural for an artist. But there is
no contradiction in the fact that he is quite overt to contacts, joint work with other
(often much younger) artists. The emotional openness in life, in his opinion, is a
professional question for an artist. He sometimes even forces himself to ruin stereotypes
in perceiving some art phenomena, situations and people. As result, he absorbs new
tendencies in arts, participates in joint exhibitions with young artists, organizes
performances at his exhibitions, which attract the attention of the whole Moscow Bohemia.
And at these performances Alexander Schwarz is not only a painter, he is a composer and a
musician, playing different musical instruments (multi instrumentalist). Being brought up
in an artistic family: his mother was an artist and his father a composer, he was closely
connected with music since his childhood. He started with jazz and he feels that it is
inseparable from him. But in spite of this, starting form the end of the 80s he works at
his home musical studio in the new trends of non-commercial rock, which is rather
phenomenal in itself. As it is natural for people to treat with partiality the musical
tastes of their youth. His desire for permanent self-expression lead him to another kind
of arts -- the day light is short, and creativity is the way of existence. Alexander
Schwarz is characterized by a rare spiritual and cultural discipline, everyday persistent
and hard work to implement the excepting aesthetic ideal, some internal harmony in the
material. At the same time the professional worship (cult) of the artist does not prevent
him from realistic understanding that all the professional skill and techniques he
mastered perfectly are not enough to create pieces of art. He is quite aware of the fact
that an artist has to possess that particular youth of his soul, which is so difficult to
keep and which you can seldom meet among the people who are not dealing with art.
Alexander Schwarz
The problem of the subject, theme or pointlessness of painting
.is of no particular importance for me. The pictures are figurative, metaphorical , but
they bear no relation to the reality of ordinary, commonplace sense and everyday life in
the conditional, generally accepted meaning. There exists some kind of metaphysical
version and I cannot give an absolutely exact and precise explanation and description of
my own pictures in the terms of spoken language, as far as it would he expressed in a way
and with the help of the methods which are not characteristic of me as a painter and
graphic artist. I believe it would be. natural to discuss the reproduction means or
methods and instruments and tools I apply, but the result should he presented in the
objects of my work themselves: in paintings,. drawings, etc. One could try to describes
the feelings and emotions during .the process of work itself, comparing oneself with some
" black box" to which the information comes in a sufficiently enough deliberate
way and often-in impalpable ways. And why the result in the form of this, or that piece
comes out of this "black box" is absolutely vague and unclear . Here I think
it's necessary to add that an artist is first and foremost a thinker who is intense at
work all the time,. working hours on end, not only at an easel, but being in a constant
process of creating. The unpredictability of the result does not change the essence: on
the contrary it makes the artist think more intensely. I believe that this way of
existence is so natural to me, that I do not need to he restricted and limited only by the
language of fine arts. When I want to do something with the help of other means and
objects, I do it, because I cannot but realize the ideas occurring to me . I think that I
am no illustrator, it is not characteristic of me, as illustrativeness forces a creator to
interpret his own pieces allegorically or makes him explain them ultimately. In the
.course of time such paintings, pictures or other pieces lose their outward formal
literary-social-historical momentary outline :and remain only the illustrations of the
past. And that materiality, which as a matter of fact is indeed more real than everyday
life and the social world, the world of objects, created by civilization, lives and grows
inside me and through my person and due to me, forming a certain cultural layer, stratum,
in which my pictures and I myself exist. There exists some kind of mess, mishmash at least
from the artist's point of view, a kind of confusion in the notions
"civilization" and "culture". For example, a lot is spoken about
modern "avant-gardism" tendencies in art and culture. And as far as
avant-gardism is concerned it is "busy" trying to find the sense and making
crosswords, puzzles and rebuses out of all that mass of things those objects which were
produced by civilization. And all the motives and incentives making people be occupied
with it all are of no importance in that case. Only those objects will "survive"
in this process which, due to the will of the authors or in spite of them, bear the
attributes not belonging to civilization, the attributes of which are quickly altering,
but the attributes of culture with its permanent eternal and constant search for harmony .
Many factors influenced the style of my work and I always consider the two-year period of
work at the Icon-Painting Studio belonging to the Moscow Patriarchy as one of the most
impressive. This work was the result of constant attention, keen and deep interest towards
icon--painting. Perhaps , the same impression close to its force was made on me only by
Chinese and Japanese schools of painting with their endless eternal striving for "one
general line" and astonishing sensation of a momentary creation act. It should be
added that I do not aim at keeping artificially to some kind of manner in my work as it is
self restriction in one's own creative activities which leads to mechanical reproduction
of the past and it means giving up the unpredictable in art, the refusal from the
impossibility to explain the result of one's work, and I should say that both these
unpredictability and incomprehensibility - are so attractive.