Mark Tochilkin personal Gallery

About MARK TOCHILKIN

The creation of a genuine artist is comparable to the creation of an entire world. The true artist's world integrates the whole spectrum of colors as well as the nuances between reality and fantasy. The artist works with the experiences of his past and the aspirations for his future. He pits the spirituality of inspiration against the routine of daily toil. The artist knows the joy of victory as well as the bitterness of defeat.

Mark Tochilkin, one of the most interesting artists of our time and an acclaimed master of modern Israeli painting, lives in this multilevel, complex and vigorous world. Tochilkin's swift ascent is an extraordinary and highly unusual phenomenon which has rocked the art world over the past few years.

The works of Tochilkin are sufficiently diverse that they cannot be reduced to a common denominator. However, I would like to outline some of the unifying values that define the individual singularity of the painter and his art.
One of the defining characteristics of Tochilkin's work is the outstanding technique and solid professionalism found in his painting, plastic art, drawing and composition. The artist's traditional training at prestigious art schools has not smothered his spontaneity, but rather has allowed him free rein to release his ingenuity and to give his creative impulse unchecked license to innovate and explore.

Also worthy of note is the artist's devotion to figurative art. Although this art form still preserves its largely inexhaustible creative potential, many of today's painters unfortunately eschew portrait painting and drawing the human figure. Tochilkin successfully manages to distance himself from the modern and post-modern trends which substitute speculative conceptions and outrageous performances for genuine art-making. Tochilkin remains true to the basics of aesthetic criteria which are fundamental to the very existence of art. A natural integrity lying behind the artist's deep-rooted connection with contemporary life is finely balanced with his creative and selective approach to world classics. This he manages to accomplish while guarding against fruitless retrospection and bland, derivative stylization of his subjects.

Another aspect of Tochilkin's work is its emotional and straightforward content. It is impossible to reduce his oeuvre to being simply topical, formal or motivated by a hidden or unknown agenda. His work also addresses the intellectual viewer, well-versed in pictorial metaphors of association and, while grotesque at times, these nevertheless express the beauty of the surrounding world. Overall, his works reveal a strong and ironic sense of humor.

The painter distances himself from straight illustration and realistic painting, instead preferring subjects which are frankly abstract and imaginary. Tochilkin views his art as a game in which the viewer is free to accept (or reject) the "rules of the game." The different facets of his work and personality expand rather than contract the many artistic planes in which the painter works. Tochilkin's creations display both the bright lights and the hidden shadows of the human comedy, which takes its shape as an indissoluble totality.

In a word, the unifying characteristic which distinguishes Tochilkin's work from his early canvases to his current work is its full-blooded vitality. It is this vitality which gives hisart its life-building energy and creates a powerful field that attracts the spectator. People who view Tochilkin's figurative language are overwhelmed by his use of vivid colors rich in eye-catching accents as well as in subtle undertones. The painter's use of color reflects the spiritual richness of his personality as well as the acknowledged value of his talent. Mark Tochilkin's creative drive has been marked by a success matched only by his fruitful talent combined with a rare capacity for hard work. The painter is fully immersed in his art which is his life's work and the very essence of his existence.

In Tochilkin's work, the past merges with the present, while the present merges with the future. The motif of nostalgia permeates the work of many artists, but Tochilkin gives new meaning to this theme in his own original and inimitable way. Nostalgia is a rather abstract title for an extensive and very heterogeneous series of paintings which has occupied Tochilkin for several years. These paintings depict neither the city of his childhood and youth, nor the country where he was born which no longer exists and perhaps never did... Sentimental, tender feelings and hackneyed (whether deliberate or subconscious) idealization of the past are alien to Tochilkin. The world which he paints is one which he created, half-real and half-imaginary. This "beyond the looking glass" world of his is filled with pools and lakes, bridges big and small, river embankments and sea fronts, sailboats and ancient paddle-wheeled steamers.

Lovers, a class unto themselves, are neither depicted as very young, nor too beautiful and hardly elegant. They are often dressed after the forgotten fashion of the 1920s and '30s, pathetic and touchingly absurd in their endless expectation of a miracle. They are shown enjoying their own share of happiness, meager though it may be. The painter allows both humor and ridicule to run free. The themes and characters of his paintings are tinged with an all-permeating irony in which the grotesque and the satirical coexist in a figurative vocabulary. Yet the Lovers series reveals a feeling of pure lyricism, romantic in its own way, and unclouded by mischievous paradoxes. These images remain subdued and sheltered from idle curiosity. The viewer is touched by the soul-wrenching melancholy of a lonely, frail and defenseless woman; holding a bunch of flowers, she awaits the arrival of a white steamship bearing luck and happiness. It is in Tochilkin's ironic and satirical staging of situations that one discerns the dramatic intonations and the genuine human feelings which conceal the pain and bitterness of unfulfilled destinies and lost hope. Farce is transformed into tragifarce, comedy into tragicomedy...nothing is as it appears at first glance. Only with a longer look does the potential of a different spiritual and aesthetic value begin to open up from within the deepest corners of Tochilkin's creative universe.

Another innovative technique developed by Mark Tochilkin is his introduction of frames, painted within the structure of the picture itself. This technique has proved itself highly effective. The frames, as a rule, are gilded and abound in ornate baroque scrolls. These deliberate splendors appear to be a sly parody of philistine love and ostentatious luxury. The artistic purport of this method has very strong implications. The doubled frame - one real, the other an illusion - appears to extend the painting's boundaries thus creating a fascinating interaction between the central characters, the marginal figures and scenes, and the viewer himself. The marginal scenes gain greater importance yet serve mainly to envelop and modify the central theme, directly or indirectly.

Music and musicians, orchestras, soloists, violinists, pianists, conductors and singers, occupy a special place in Mark Tochilkin's series entitled Music. His subjects have included famous performers such as Paganini, Arthur Rubinstein, Leonard Bernstein and David Oistrakh to name but a few. In contrast Tochilkin also paints members of the orchestra. The translation of one kind of art, the concert performance, into the language of another kind of art, the visual, is a problematic if not a hopeless preoccupation. Yet Tochilkin has managed to find and incarnate on his canvases a visual equivalent of music. In these works the expression of color, light and compositional rhythm echoes the expression of music through delineating its dramatic intonations and allowing the musical notes to become discernible. His Music series depicts an impressive symbiosis of color, line and tone which echoes the sound of music. In this series, music is not only present, it is the climax in which the soloist, conductor and orchestra attain a state of ultimate spiritual and creative tension.

The paradox of Mark Tochilkin's creative style lies in his combining of the incompatible. He possesses a remarkable appreciation and knowledge of music and greatly admires musicians and their work. He marries his love of music and musicians with his biting humor to create sparkling and witty (though at times slightly grotesque) characterizations of the great virtuoso performers. His pictures simultaneously reveal both pathetic and sarcastic elements, an unusual combination of forms, not often heard or seen.

Mark Tochilkin's creations are very vivid. Any classification of his work based on stylistic, serial or thematic grounds is contra-indicated to the processes underlying his development. His work is highly unpredictable and extremely responsive to all that happens in the surrounding world. Having established his own niche within the modern art world, Tochilkin has gained confidence in his abilities and continues to experiment with his gifts. This enables him to produce some of his more daring paintings: Battle, Tragedy, Duck Hunting, Lion King, as well as Crocodile Hunting, all of which feature bizarre creatures which are reminiscent of a daring ignorance found in children's drawings. The innocence and purity characteristic of these primitive beings is colored by the irony of a sophisticated professional. Skillfully, the artist deliberately profanes old and worn out stereotypes. This multilayered texture of these images testifies to the growing complexity of the creative processes and to the inner freedom of a painter who chooses freely from among all of the artistic genres and devices.

Another trend which appears in Tochilkin's work is his willingness to return to a specific theme after a lapse of a few years. These theme paintings, while based on an earlier, similar series will, nevertheless, always embrace a new twist, a new approach to the same subject. Also, new themes are being constantly introduced into his work.

The recent exhibit of a new series entitled Nudes caused a tremendous sensation. The paintings and drawings chosen for the exhibit were as diverse in character as they were in their level of execution. On the one hand the classical nudes demonstrated the artist's mastery of painterly skills combined with academic knowledge. In these works Tochilkin resists accusations of eroticism and society art. He contrasts these pieces with ironic, even sarcastic, paraphrases of classical subjects and poses.

These images are mercilessly grotesque caricatures of eroticism and make a deadly mockery of philistine conceptions of beauty.

The Nudes series clearly shows that Tochilkin could hardly be called a moralist, a denunciator of morals and modern social manners. His vocation is his art, and he transfers his thoughts and feelings into the palpable flesh and blood of pictorial images. His figures are lifelike, or just as often fantastic, bordering on the surrealistic. It is the buffoon or the clown which attracts Tochilkin. It is the mask concealing a tumult of mock or genuine passions underneath it which appeals to his artistic personality. As in his biblical painting of Judith with the head of her victim, the Assyrian general Holofernes, Tochilkin depicts Holofernes as a clown, revealing the mockery in the situation.

As an artist, Tochilkin is unwilling to totally disengage himself from the reality which surrounds his daily life. Tel Aviv is the center of the country and his artist's studio is in the center of Tel Aviv. The windows and the doors of the studio are left wide open to welcome urbi et orbi - the city and the world. His painting entitled the Dove of Peace depicts steamships in the Haifa harbor. Khamsin (Desert Heat) and Old Tel Aviv glance into the past, while Greater Tel Aviv is a view of the city today. Tochilkin paints and repaints modern Tel Aviv, revealing the world which inspires his creativity, the land in which he lives, and his home within that land.

Jewish themes in Mark Tochilkin's work form a topic in itself. Their national and Jewish identity is crucial to the work of any Israeli painter. Tochilkin's bond with his Jewish roots was well-established even before he came to call Israel his home. His painting expresses his deep commitment to his heritage. The painter has no need to portray the Jewish shtetl of the Diaspora, extinct before his birth. His interests lie rather in the origins of Judaism and in the epos of the Bible. His Biblical paintings are titled Prophet, David and Goliath, Ascent, Moses, Jerusalem and another Jerusalem. Other canvases depict wise old rabbis, the keepers of biblical wisdom and Jewish tradition. Sarcasm and irony are more than improper in this series of works, which are characterized from conception to the final brushstroke by a profound seriousness. These paintings have added another significant facet to the already established image of the artist.

Mark Tochilkin perceives the world as having many dimensions and being multifaceted. His world contains a maelstrom of passions: confrontation and unity, good and evil, harmony and disharmony. His world conception is one of sharp contrasts and of lyrical peacefulness. With Tochilkin everyday realities are converted into phantasmagorias, such as his image of an angel flying in the sky before an advertisement for Coca-Cola. In Tochilkin's universe, the concentrated drama of a red-black corridor gives way to the silver-blue subtlety of nostalgic visions. Tochilkin juxtaposes the touching defenselessness of the world's more humble creatures, a small donkey, a bull calf, a bird and a dog, with the aggressiveness of conquistadors. The artist shifts easily from the noisy, polyphonic chaos of these pieces to the quiet, silent, almost monochromatic subtlety of other canvases which he paints simultaneously. These heterogeneous and contradictory phenomena identify the artist's brilliant and powerful creative genius.

His work, however, cannot be canonized by any of the existing trends in modern art. Expressionism is Tochilkin's philosophy of life. Expressionism, perhaps, comes closest to describing his style, and more nearly fits the artist's character and temperament as well. Tochilkin's preference for the grotesque is likewise an outgrowth of his surrealistic world, in which he shows the routine order of life in topsy-turvy upheaval. The artist's love of folklore finds a continuation in the poetics of visual primitivism. While Tochilkin's work can be defined in stylistic terms, it is his own strong personal involvement which gives his paintings their unique energy and power.

Tochilkin communicates with his "audience" through the language of painting. The viewer becomes personally involved with his creations, whether the image is a heroic piece or a tragic biblical episode; the piercing grief of a lonely accordion player on a garden bench or the earthly sorrow of black and white angels; the unreal magnificence of a dim-blue Jerusalem or a vibrant scene of Tel Aviv; the compressed spiritual energy of a brilliant violinist or the quivering reflections of bridges, people, trees and sails mirrored in the untroubled surface of a river. The absolute seriousness and ever-present irony of Tochilkin's outlook on life transfers images into a different dimension, one in which the living reality becomes separated from the method of its creation. It is these ideas which characterize Tochilkin's world outlook and, as I interpret it, reflect his national identity.

Dr. Grigory Ostrovsky
Professor of Art History

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Mark Tochilkin personal Gallery