VASILY KAFANOV
Dialogue is characteristic of the artist’s style and iconography. In the left third of the composition is a figure wearing glasses, a white mask, and a red-and-white flecked shirt. His head is crowned with a golden tower that tapers upward to a point, and he’s playing a white pipe and facing a similar-looking musician playing a pipe back to him from the right third of the canvas. In the space between them and overhead floats a golden fish bearing a more rounded tower on its back. Unlike the musicians, the tower-fish has very little contrasting color. If it weren’t for a gentle burnt-umber shadow following its bodily contours, it might be indistinguishable from the glowing background. Kafanov further activates the already scintillating surface by scattering across it a variety of tiny, idiosyncratic details. If you look closely you can see little red or black arrows, as well as isolated numbers and Russian words. The mind boggles at the sheer amount of minutiae in most of these paintings; and in fact the artist often paints a thin frame around the compositions, seemingly to contain them.
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Kafanov’s treatment of the tower-fish is much more visually poetic in another work, called simply The Tower. Here the building is bathed in layers of blended mauves and oranges that change to white near the top, and the background is a gentle mix of blues, violets, and orangy mauves. This time the fish is not painted but etched into an impastoed area of mauve background and thereby rendered ghostly; it also seems to swim through the tower’s top section instead of carrying the tower on its back. The profuse, vivid black ink lines common in Kafanov’s other works are hardly noticeable here, and the resulting homogeneous surface conveys a quiet, mystical feeling much different from the artist’s usual extroverted mood.
