Kyiv artist and showman Hennady Hutharts staged a real action painting performance at the ceremony of opening his exhibit, Clouds Like Heroes, at the Block A Gallery. The star is a veteran of the Kyiv bohemian world. In the 1980s his name was already popular with the local avant-garde and dedicated public. Among the so-called informal teenagers breaking into rock concerts and gathering on Velyka Zhytomyrska Street it was a coup to know Hennady. He staged concerts of the rock groups Aquarium and Auction, followed by Mamonov and Colibri; he was the producer of VV that was just starting. The name of his daughter Argentina in St. Petersburg (named not in honor of Evita Peron’s homeland but Argentum, Latin for silver) had to be known by every member of the beau monde. Showman perhaps best describes what Hennady Hutharts is all about, although he prefers inner freedom to outward extravagance.
Hennady took up painting when very young, doing so outside the institute context. His education is more like guild training; he studied at the studio of Kyiv artist Yevhen Mukhoyid. He also considers Soviet dissident artist Anatoly Zverev and the anonymous authors of all those primordial rock paintings as his teachers. In fact, he still studies and copies petroglyphs.
Love of action has always had its impact on all his endeavors. Still considering himself primarily an artist, he continues to stage various kinds of discotheques and other spectacular public soirees at fashionable clubs or quite unexpected places (a New Year party in a swimming pool, for example). Likewise, in the fine arts, the process, action, and idea are more important than the result.
His life-asserting graphic series at Block A is the result of old sketches. The dull graphics of Soviet design bureaus are lavishly complimented by colorful erotic scenes. His nudes are naive, devoid of shame, and chaste in the way only those first stepping into paradise must have been. Positioned side by side are pastose canvases using open colors without black and white, decorative and merry despite all their formalism. Both this formal approach and the way Hutharts designs his works for private collections (surrounding minimalist aborigines with personally decorated baguettes) reveals his devotion to action. This means that the auction painting show was well to be expected.
Action painting dates from the 1940s. It is when an artist creates a picture in front of an audience or cameras. “Here the culmination is not so much the picture as the process of making it,” Hennady explains. “During my performances the audience can become part of my pictures, and these pictures are about an artist painting a picture.” US abstract painter Jackson Pollock is considered a classic of action painting. There are thousands of feet of film showing this grim paint-dripper immersed in the creative process. Modern painters take an interest in such painting in public now and then. Sergei Bugayev of St. Petersburg (Africa) currently tries to impress his audiences in Europe, blocking his exhibitionist drive with layers of irrelevant concepts. With Hutharts, it is much merrier, entertaining, making the whole thing fit into the modern context, not as a quotation from culture studies but as something very much alive.
Hutharts’s performance reminded one of a nightclub program with its regular erotic show regarded by most as a matter of course, with the patrons hardly even glancing that way. What during the days of Elvis was the most risque and cool nowadays looks a bit naive, an element that must be there as a part of progressive culture.
In his art Hutharts is sensual and anthropocentric. Of course, there was a nude girl whom the artist painted over to a nostalgic tune of “The Shocking Blues.” He and his assistant lifted the girl and leaned her to a framed canvas on the wall (before that Hutharts had applied merry colors to the canvas, to a cheerful music accompaniment). The resultant impression (a sitting or flying figure) looked very much like a petroglyph. A few more brush strokes and an abstract painting became one of subject matter. The performance did not last long, yet the audience’s mood steadily and inexplicably rose. In the end everybody applauded the heroic girl and the master.
Hennady Hutharts’ action painting exercises are quite popular with the general public, no matter we hear about the retrospective naivete of this practice and author’s enthusiasm. In our hi-tech age they remind us that the Titanic was built by experts, but Noah’s arc by amateurs.
