Room #4, 2014
Interview with Ivan Plusch
with material from a previous interview by Isabella Chalfant
Ivan Plusch, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, brings a refined academic foundation to his bold investigations of material, memory, and form. Now based in Hungary, Plusch continues to evolve his distinctive visual language—where remnants of architecture, figures, and structures appear to melt, erode, or unravel. His work explores the instability of perception and the slow disintegration of collective ideals, transforming classical technique into a contemporary, conceptual force.
Matney Gallery; Could you elaborate on the core vision that drives your artistic practice?
Ivan Plusch: “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.
Matney Gallery: Could you speak to the early inspirations that shaped your approach to art?
Ivan Plusch: ”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.
Effect Series, 2018
By that time, I had been playing professional tennis for quite a while and was a candidate for Master of Sports. But after my attitude toward painting shifted, I clearly realized what truly mattered to me. I'm on the autism spectrum, which made me a very withdrawn child—I tended to keep to myself. Through art, I found a way to connect and express who I am. It’s been an organic and essential part of my life ever since.
By that time, I had been playing professional tennis for quite a while and was a candidate for Master of Sports. But after my attitude toward painting shifted, I clearly realized what truly mattered to me. I'm on the autism spectrum, which made me a very withdrawn child—I tended to keep to myself. Through art, I found a way to connect and express who I am. It’s been an organic and essential part of my life 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.
”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
Matney Gallery: How long did it take you to develop your current style?
Ivan Plusch: “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.
”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’.
From The Ministry of Love Series, 2017
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.
Effect-Series, 2018
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.
“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.”
