I prefer
not to "depict"

Painterliness and Materials

Mironov's native element is painterliness. What he creates are genuinely painterly canvases. He works with traditional painting materials, which is fundamentally important to him. It is important if only because his art stood in opposition to the powerful wing of plastic innovation of the second half of the 1970s and 1980s, which had declared it the norm to introduce various material objects into the composition of a picture. Against this transformation of the picture into an artistic concept Mironov set the principles of classical pictorial creation. Being lyrical meditations upon spontaneous states of mind, his canvases are intended for romantic and contemplative perception; they touch the poetic "strings of the soul" more than our capacity to construct an artistic image with the mind. His abstractions are able to say a great deal about nuances of feeling, about the almost imperceptible intonations and rhythms of the author's "music of the soul," about something uniquely his own, something concealed. In them, invisible spiritual and physical connections are experienced as visible, as echoes of past visual and emotional experience.

In Mironov's creative practice, pictures executed in a dryly detailed manner are not uncommon. Yet works created in an improvisatory key, in a single breath, predominate. But in both cases the viewer is given to share in the process of execution: he is communicated that evident pleasure which the author experienced in the process of making the picture. The viewer is involuntarily infected by this state of the artist. The artistry of the painterly devices, of the whole impulsive manner of painting, is intended to awaken the creative instincts dormant in every person. Experienced lovers of art especially value this contagious capacity of a work to prompt the viewer's mental transformation into a co-author of the artist.

A View of Nature

Incidentally, this mention of nature obliges one to note our artist's genre constancy: he is a landscape painter through and through. Of course, this concerns his figurative works. But many of his abstract pieces, too, are perceived, in the context of this generic preference, as metaphorical variations on landscape themes. His rejection of the principles of Sots Art, of the topical social content of his own art, was made in favour of the spiritual, primordial foundations of that art.

For Mironov the romantic, the landscape motif is of interest not in itself, but exclusively as material for the expression of his subjective perception of the world. For him nature is merely an intermediary between his inner "I" and the responsive soul of the viewer. It is in these works that, as an artistic scale, there appears now the great Englishman Turner (and then the pictures are ruled by the lofty order of primordial chaos), now the German Romantics (in pictures that inspire an experience of mystical insight, spiritual revelation, sorrow, and so forth). At the centre of the artist's attention lies some timeless and, as a rule, extraordinarily potent subjective experience "occasioned by" something. Such an occasion might be a sense of transience at the sight of a cross against an "eternal" distance, or a vague unease provoked by a mystical light pouring from the heavenly cosmos; motifs of being lost and of solitude are also frequent with him, finding their figurative equivalents now in a lone old tree, now in a sailing boat tossed at the mercy of the waves, that romantic captive of the boundless sea. The romantic theme of human destiny, and the romantic confessional quality bound up with it, determine the particular character of the figurative structure of Mironov's landscapes. In other words, he is concerned with eternal themes, which illustrate concrete manifestations of the "epochal", the "historical", the "realistic".

But, strangely enough, they evoke the memory of sounds, colours and forms of the real world experienced before. Characteristic examples of this work include "In Dream and Reality" (1982), "Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow" (1987), "Dream" (1988), "On the Edge" (1989) and many others. In them, the artist recreates a spatial environment full of mystery, one that lives, as every creation of memory, of capricious recollection, lives, by the laws of a past that is difficult to reconstruct, a "lost" (in Proust's sense) time, a phenomenon that has proved so important for the artistic consciousness of the twentieth century. Nothing here is meant for rational comprehension, but rather for intuitive deepening and approach towards the intriguingly alluring, yet clearly unfathomable mysteries of the world. One recalls the Japanese saying: "A painting is a silent poem." Indeed, Mironov's surrealist painting is akin to poetic texts, whose figurative fabric is woven from endless intersections and collisions of "direct" meanings and subtexts, metaphors and associations, recreating the absurd situation of a dream. The departure from all rationality here signifies the artist's automatic following, as demanded by the poetics of classical surrealism, of the promptings of his subconscious. But, I repeat, the very absurdity of the subjects in these paintings is of a particular kind: it is lyrical in nature, of subjective-emotional origin.

There are no sharply defined boundaries between the various stylistic forms of Mironov's painting. He crosses these dividing lines "without difficulty", with the natural grace of a man who remains himself on both sides of them. Between these stylistic registers, on closer inspection, there turn out to be many figurative and plastic interdependencies.

The communicative vitality of Mironov's painting, its capacity to draw the viewer into the circle of artistic ideas expressed within it, is explained by a whole range of its features. Among these one may name a romantic confessional quality and suggestiveness, traits inherent, albeit to varying degrees, in both its figurative and its abstract branches.

The suggestive, evocative effect of this painting on the viewer is largely explained by the distinctive psychologism of the artist's work. Even his abstract compositions are always deeply personal, full of shifting moods of the most varied kind, saturated with associative-psychological content. This correspondence in scale between the figurative-emotional structure of Mironov's painting and man, its address to human feeling and the heart, is especially important in the case of "lyrical abstraction". For we have long been accustomed to the notion that abstract art is dehumanised, that its very essence lies in a total flight from man. Of course, one may indeed speak of a "flight", if one means by this its fundamental refusal to depict man. But, on the other hand, one cannot fail to speak also of its closeness to man, to the same degree that music or plotless poetry is close to him.

There was already occasion above to speak of how the artist's rich imagination is connected by some magical threads, and somehow mysteriously and inexplicably correlated, with real life impressions, experiences and states of the soul. Artistic association, for all the freedom of depiction from inert materiality, is directed towards revealing the essential qualities of the surrounding world: such as its capacity for endless transformation, the plastic expression of which is the painterly expressionism of Mironov's pictures, or the dialectic of the eternal and the finite in the universe, of rest and motion, of light and darkness.

Before certain canvases by Mironov the viewer is given the chance to touch upon the mysteries of the cosmos of nature. The abstract works "Falling" (1988) and "Flight" (1988), for instance, are perceived as metaphorical echoes of cosmic processes: visually free of the garments of reality, they provoke lyrical reflection in connection with an occurrence "in general", rather than a specific situation, even where the title itself is entirely specific. The style of these abstract canvases is lyrical expressionism. Again and again one must return to this definition, "lyrical", in order to bring out the individual features of the emotional register of Mironov's art.

This style dominates his works of the last two or three years. In terms of subject (dramaturgy), these works are of interest for their juxtaposition of images of the eternal harmony of the universe with dynamic manifestations of uncontrollable forces and energies. The presence of such oppositions underlines the central pathos of Mironov's artistic and intellectual aspirations: he reminds us of the existence of a healing harmony, the path to which is bound up with struggle, cataclysm and the overcoming of the world's destructive principles. It bears repeating that grasping the pictorial dramaturgy outlined here is rewarding only if one contemplates it at length. The reward will be immersion in a world of elevated poetry, a release from the noise and bustle of our life.

In the works of 1988–1990, the device of juxtaposing geometric figures, merged with the pictorial plane of the canvas, with spatial painterly structures representing the romantic phantasmagorias typical of the artist, proved both plastically expressive and rich in meaning. The introduction of suprematist objects, unexpected in their severity, into the painterly environment sharpens enormously the experience of space. In works such as "Daydream" (1988), "The Labour of Sisyphus" (1988), "Tunnel" (1989) and many, many others, spatial coordinates (far-near) are charged with emotional and psychological functions. The geometric elements, which seem to whisper the name of Malevich to the viewer, are placed in semantically "charged" zones of the picture and, in contrast with them (a contrast between ordered, mathematically calibrated form and the spontaneous, ever-changing substance of the cosmos), acquire a context that is difficult to put into words. This effect of elusive meaning intrigues perception and awakens the viewer's interest in the picture.

The further evolution of his art is unpredictable: he is inclined to decisive changes of "course". But one thing may be relied upon, namely the organic quality of each change of style, the fundamental readiness underlying each of his innovations.

S. M. Ivanitsky
Head of the Department of Contemporary Art
State Tretyakov Gallery.
1993