Room #4, 2014

Artist Interview with Ivan Plusch: The Existential Threshold within Paint

By Isabella Chalfant

Ivan Plusch, is an artist that has developed a style of painting that evokes questions about time itself. His paintings ooze and flow in different directions allowing time and gravity to accompany him as the artist in a collaborative dance. Plusch, born in 1981, graduated from the St. Petersburg Academy of Art and Design in St. Petersburg, Russia. He later attended Cite Internationale des Artes in Paris, France. Ivan currently resides in Hungary and has been living there since 2016. Given his unique painting technique, the Matney Gallery conducted the following interview to better understand his painting process and his artist’s purpose.
The first question we ask our artists when conducting an interview is,” What is your vision as an artist?” This question immediately delves into the core of the artist’s
work allowing the rest of the interview to elaborate on different subjects within this vision.

When we asked Ivan about his vision as an artist, he responded with, “The main question I explore is the question of the existential being of the modern human on the border between the current reality and the reality of new media and technology. I view this process as that of continual and gradual disappearance from existence. The impossibility of finding one's own world, as well as the boundary state between existence and non-existence, form the basis of my work. I try to capture the increasing phantom of existence and disappearance in the environment, the splicing with artificial scenery, not in a particular moment, but by fixing the flow of time through the flow of paint.” The artist’s use of flowing paint captures moments without freezing them in place, allowing them to continue their movement.

We continued the interview by asking Plusch about how he found his artistic calling and where he drew his inspiration from, to which he replied, ”Strangely enough, I partook very early of the infinite universe of this activity and myself in it. Of course all children love to represent the world and create their own on paper and I was no exception: I loved painting. Perhaps the important moment was when I realized that you can not just depict the subject and put the image of the meaningful subject into the painting. This is when the subject becomes something more than its original essence.
After this discovery I started to perceive painting very differently: for me it became a world I ran head first into. I remember how at school lessons I could look at the school dumpster from the window for a long time, thinking about its ‘place’ in the yard, the green color in relation to the red and yellow leaves in autumn, early spring greenery etc.

By that time I had been playing tennis professionally for quite a long time and was a candidate for master of sports, but after that change in my attitude to painting I clearly felt, realized what the most important thing was for me.
I have an autistic spectrum and that made me very detached as a child, keeping myself to myself. And I discovered myself in art, and this area has been very organic for me ever since.” At a very early age, Ivan was able to break through artistic conventions and discover his artistic vision, allowing him to discover not only himself but his calling. He studied the minute interactions between objects and their relationships with each other in a scene. This talent permitted him to start seeing how the addition of the “meaningful subject” would interact with the rest of the objects, simultaneously creating interference and unity in these spatial relationships.
We then asked Ivan about what his artist's process looks like and he said, ”I have an idea for a statement and then I look for a way to visualize it. I once joked that the fluidity I created is conceptual formalism. I have always been interested in how to express a meaning, a concept, through a visual language because I consider contemporary art to focus on meanings.
Sometimes it is an installation but more often a painting. The material for my work is based on research into ideas of contemporary philosophy, social and technical studies which have a humanitarian dimension and influence the existence of the physical body in the future, the formation of an interaction between the individual and reality and how it goes beyond the corporeal. Naturally, an important part is also my empirical experience as an artist living in the space of Russia, which is experiencing a change in the ideological and fundamental principles of existence. I base my work on the legacy of artists of worldwide significance, such as René Magritte and their successors – Neo Rauch, Adrian Gheney, so it is possible to say that the context of the surrealist and neo-surrealist approaches to reality is quite close to me. Nevertheless, by taking this direction I aim at creating individual images based on my personal acquisition of experience, research and construction of reality, and a method of its representation through techniques that are unique to me.”

4 Red Balls, 2016

In accordance with the previous question we also wanted to know how long it took for the artist to develop his technique/style of painting, he elaborated by stating, “In 2009 I realized how to convey my idea through visual means, so the first project ‘News’ appeared. A very important point of reference for me is the creation of the
‘Unconquered’ studio by my friends and me. When it opened in 2007 I had a sufficiently large studio at my disposal to produce great work. The organizational experience and communication gained in that period has helped me enormously.
For as long as I can remember all my thoughts and experiences have been transformed into drawings and paintings. It all began in my childhood when I invented and created toys out of rubber, wood, cardboard and wire – it was probably the fact that over time has become one of the semantic layers of my art, the setting in which the character lies.” Ivan Plusch is an artist that puts himself into his art, he puts his experiences, his thoughts, and the questions he has for the world into his work. His medium carries with it the culmination of his life’s history.

Upon viewing his work, the gallery noticed that despite his paintings having many different elements to it, it still keeps an air of simplicity. So we asked Ivan what symbolism his artwork is meant to hold, given the different elements present in his paintings. He told us, ”My artistic practice is based on working on a picture, which I conceptualize as a medium and try to change the essence of the notion of it: the picture as part of the art of painting is conceptualized as something directly related to the artist, where the process of creating the work is as important as the result. In my artistic practice I try to get away from this determinism of the media and create works that
remain samples of painting, but which are as abstract as possible from the hand of the artist. The result in this case is the only important component, and the process of ‘living painting’ is abolished. Nevertheless, the painting captures a result of the flow of paints through time at a particular moment of time. My paintings consist of two layers: the first is the setting, which comprises the environment of the character, which, in turn, can be given with a varied degree of realism: from the familiar interiors of dwelling in the series
‘A Play without Actors’ to the gray space of a non-place in the series ‘The Ministry of Love’.

The character is presented as ‘something’ - stuck, flattened between the artificial space of the painting pushing it out and the organic plane of the painting itself, which becomes a reversed window - we do not look into a new world, but the world of the painting seeks to ‘pour out’ into the reality of existence. The character, limited by their media, gets stuck at this border of his worlds and slowly begins to destructurize and drain out due to the impossibility of their existence.” There is a juxtaposition between the commentary that Plusch creates about pushing beyond the boundary of existence and the limitations of one’s media confining the “character” to another existence. This viewpoint can be taken further, questioning whether we are confined to the existence we know, thereby keeping us from pushing into another reality beyond that of our own.
We wanted the artist to elaborate on how he hopes to convey the way he sees the world and how he thinks. We wanted to know if his art was an expression of how he thinks the world should look. He replied, ”I try to communicate what concerns me, to show my perspective through my personal experience.

Each of my projects reveals a separate issue of modern existence, from political and topical issues to the question of human existence in general. In the project ‘The Ministry of Love’ I explore the process of displacement of individuality within totalitarian regimes that abolish the human and the human being in favor of the existence of a faceless system. The space of the project is a non-place space where impersonality and drabness reach their limit, excluding the individual and turning him into a phantom. The ‘Sticky Fingers Effect’ explores the impossibility of returning to the past, individual objects from childhood and memory haunting the characters, making it impossible to move into the future. ‘The Sticky Fingers Effect’ is a reaction to the exploration of current technology in the field of body teleportation, where the problem of splicing the teleportation tool and the object prevents it from reassembling itself, just as objects from childhood prevent the characters from reassembling themselves in the present. The project ‘A Play without Characters’ shows collisions of the modern interior, which also appears as a kind of non-space and the sky as a character. The sky, a symbol of hopes, dreams and aspirations for the future, disintegrates in the space of a typical modern living environment. The ‘News’ project shows the process of splitting of the character – the presenter inside the television space of the world constructed by modern technologies.

Fixation of the process extended in time but transmitted by means of a static picture is also one of the main ideas of my works. The present, the past and the future are condensed into a single moment of existence, which inevitably splits the character's habitual corporeality within a non-space, taking it into a stream of particles whose existence is only possible within the horizon of our life. The character's flow is conditioned by the direction of time and is possible only within this horizon. The direction of the flow of paint determines the meaning of the movement of time. Left to right are the accomplished events, while right to left goes the future. Time is one of the participants in the painting; it is presented non-linearly, but as a kind of frozen point in terms of setting, and as the action for the character.” We can see the different directions that the paint flows in “Room #4”, “4 Red Balls”, and the other works presented in this article. This exemplifies the collaboration Ivan holds with time and gravity which impose their will onto the paint creating a free flowing moment.

The last question we asked Ivan was about how he hoped that the viewer would perceive his art, he answered, “I always hope that on leaving my exhibition the viewer will become a bit different, that the questions I ask – those I care about – will resonate with them. Perhaps, merging with some other questions of their own, they will be interested to think about them, which will make them richer.”

The Matney Gallery has been honored to display Ivan Plusch’s work in our landmark exhibition, A Glimpse Into The Future. His works from this show are still
available on Artsy.net. Ivan’s paintings are works of art meant to evoke thought, to create questions, even echo the questions that the artist asks the world. The complexity of ideas and experiences converge within the boundaries of flowing paint. The concept of existence within art and within reality is stretched to its limit and the figures in Plusch’s work attempt to stretch beyond the paint. But these figures are kept confined to the very fabric of their creation, unable to go further without dissolving into a separate reality. The artist creates a complex commentary about existence, reality, and time, while keeping the figures and elements of his paintings captive to simplicity.