Gor Chahal’s “Bread of Heaven”: A special project of the Tretyakov Gallery

Gor Chahal carried out his special project “Bread of Heaven” in collaboration with the Tretyakov Gallery. Such projects are different from solo shows: each special project is usually focused on a certain idea related to the oeuvre of a particular artist. One of the objectives of such special projects is to present artistic innovations and to add to the gallery’s collection the works of the best contemporary masters who, rather than producing separate pieces, are determined to generate a continuous body of work, following the avant-garde concept of arts synthesis.

Within the space of the gallery, the room where these experiments develop is at the conclusion of the permanent exhibition of 20th-century art, just before the suite of rooms on the second floor where the newest art trends are showcased: thus, the room connects the traditional and the modern.

Gor Chahal is one of the most noteworthy contemporary artists, probably the only one whose creative method combines and synthesizes a scholarly approach and the elements of a ritual. As an “actual” artist, Chahal is of a type rarely found in the Russian artistic community: a “universal master”, with a diploma in science — applied mathematics, from the Moscow Institute of Engineering and Physics (MIFI) — and also a contributor to numerous creative experiments undertaken in cooperation with groups of poets, musicians and artists¹. But while the style of Chahal’s creations seems to lie within the context of Actual Art, in substance they are, in some sense, at the other end of the spectrum.

In his work Chahal has attempted something that artists from his circle normally avoid: his themes often concern faith, without the negative attitude that often dominates postmodern interpretations of this subject, but with a deep awareness that true art simply cannot exist without contact with the tradition of the sacred, Christianity in this case. For the artist, the antagonism at the heart of the creative processes of the last century — specifically, the opposition of beauty and truth — is a cause for re-unification of the two absolutes. In an attempt to synthesize them he creates a new artistic language relying on the technological devices available for modern artists and ancient religious tradition (“The Sun of Truth, Goodness and Beauty”, 2004, Museums-Quartier, Vienna). However, the artist believes that such re-unification cannot be achieved without certain efforts on the part of both the art object’s creator and the viewer. In other words, the artist conceptualizes the nascence of a work of art only in terms of vigorous penetration of the essence of an artistic proto-image: as the result of the joint efforts of the artist and the viewer. About his project “Arming the Eye” (1995), Chahal said: “... We must grow inside us a certain instrument that would enable us to better see the essence of an art object through the impermeable layers of cultural and pseudo-cultural incrustation”². For Gor, as a classical artist, the module of an artwork is a human being, and more precisely, a human being at a point when perception, an inherent faculty of human nature, is objectified (in the “MAN” project from 1997 a human being is both the object and the subject of the “work”). The special “scientific” vision necessary for perception of the essence of an image — and it is the “resurrection of image” that engages the artist — is to be brought about with the help of cutting-edge technologies that afford the opportunity to “objectively” see the ideal world.

Chahal’s special project “Bread of Heaven” is a continuation of a previous work, “Bread and Wine, and Mother-Damp-Earth”, which was conceptualized by the artist as the visualization of the “experimental confirmation of the hypothesis about the trans-physical impact of the works of modern art on the ‘noosphere’”. Although art history experts do not doubt that artwork has an impact on human consciousness and on live objects in the material world, they still believe that it affects consciousness alone. Chahal in his work attempts to unite science and art, staging an experiment, through art, which confirms that the impact reaches the material substance while also calling on his colleagues to start thinking about their responsibility for their deeds.

The spatial composition “Bread of Heaven” includes five series of artwork united by a common idea encapsulated in the name of the “work”; the first series, “Mount Tabor”, comprises a gypsum model of the hill fashioned after its topographic profile as well as the hill’s 3-D model on the screen and photographs of the model from different angles. Each series is focused on some of the most important themes of the New Testament and Christian mentality as a whole. Mount Tabor is the Mountain of Transfiguration; the artist’s idea is that every ledge of the hill should be proportionate to, or a little bigger than, a step of a staircase, so that the climb would require some effort (“The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force”, Matthew 11:12).

The next series — “Bread and Wine and the Lord God Who He Is” — is a series of photographs made using a reverse perspective and devoted to the main symbols of the Gospel, which are visualized as compositions featuring bread, wine, a cluster of grapes, the Bible and theological books. The artist photographed the same collection of items from different angles. When the angle of vision is changed, the sizes and proportions of the objects change too, in agreement with the principle of reverse perspective, affording the viewer a glimpse of a different reality of the familiar objects. The viewer is drawn into the process of creation of a whole image, which his or her imagination should generate.

The series “Miracle” is the next set of photographs on a canvas, “based on miraculous happenings connected with bread and wine, as related in the Gospel”. The neat compositions created by Chahal begin the exposition of the Gospel miracles, such as turning bread into wine, the feeding of the 4,000 and 5,000, and transfiguration of the material substance, which, historically, is at the core of the Christian Sacrament of the Table (the Eucharist, or the Lord’s Supper). If we are to adopt the opinion of Karen Svasian, according to whom the artist neither confirms nor negates events of the world, but rather names and articulates them, then the verb “to articulate” is the best word to apply to Chahal’s images of the loaves of bread and fish. At first glance, the images created by him are as simple as the letters of an alphabet. The bread, fish, wine and water, seen by the artist “excited by the power of attention and love”³, suddenly become polysemic, with no single possible interpretation — not even a sum of such interpretations — fit for full understanding, and yet they afford to an attentive viewer a glimpse of something that lies beyond the realm of the visible.

One of the most expressive series of photographs, “Sacrifice”, characterized by its creator as “symbolic stages of the Eucharistic Lamb in the course of the Liturgy of Preparation and the Divine Liturgy”, is an assortment of images of a light-bearing, gold-like substance. Light and gold reference not only the protophenomena of the Christian mentality, but also the artist’s previous works, where these substances were represented as indispensable for the generating of forms (“Love”, 1997, Moscow, Marat Guelman Gallery; “Joy”, 2002, Moscow, Fine Art Gallery; “Mein Gold”, 2002, Moscow, Marat Guelman Gallery).

The sculpture “The Light of the Triple Sun” — “a visualization of the Heavenly Forces’ breakthrough into real space” — serves as a counterpoint to the general composition. The image of the Light of the Triple Sun, found in certain icons, in Chahal’s sculpture acquires a three-dimensional form and a different (from bottom up) trajectory in space, compositionally closing and interlinking all the themes both in terms of substance and in terms of form.

Thematically, all the series as a whole arrange themselves into a structure that goes up like a flight of stairs, with movement both vertical and horizontal. “Bread and Wine and the Lord God Who He Is” is the prototype of the Eucharist corresponding with the sacrament of communion. “Miracle” represents the miracles of turning water into wine, the feeding of the 4.000 and 5.000, and the transfiguration of the material substance which, historically, is at the core of the sacrament of Eucharist. “Sacrifice” represents the symbolical transfiguration of the material substance of bread and wine (the Eucharistic lamb) into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, who sacrificed himself for the people’s sake. “The Light of the Triple Sun”, the divine force shooting through matter and transfiguring it, is the symbol of the transfiguration of the world that was made possible by this redemptive sacrifice.

The subject of Mount Tabor is a key one, on a par with the themes of the Sacrifice and the Triple Sun — it is both the base and the summit, the beginning and the end of the way. Along this way, the miracle of turning water into wine and feeding the 4.000 and the 5.000 happens and, finally, the redemptive Sacrifice, reproduced as a miracle in the Divine Liturgy, is made.

Thus, the “Bread of Heaven” in some sense is an attempt to reproduce “an icon in space”⁴ — in other words, the treatment of real space which acquires, through art, a content, as the classic examples of devotional art that transfigure and alter space preparing it for serving as a medium of communication with another world; in Chahal’s case, with the world lying beyond an unreachable horizon. The desire to re-instate art in its primeval role as a medium makes the artist think that “...the return of artists, in the age of the Renaissance, to linear perspective is tantamount to the artists’ loss of a desire to look beyond the horizon. loss of interest in the divine world”.

The treatment of space both inside and outside the image, as well as a dialogue with the productive ideas of the avant-garde, have become the main formgenerating principle for the artist. The reverse-perspective photographic images accomplished with a Fresnel lens⁵, reproduced on a canvas and featuring the main Gospel symbols, seem to be intended to establish a “look beyond the horizon” as an objective, mathematically-proven reality. Chahal’s artwork casts a completely new light on the arguments about the appropriateness, desirability or equal significance of axonometric, linear and reverse perspectives put forward by several researchers — his oeuvre shows the necessity of synthesizing the perspectives not by simple arithmetic addition but in anticipation of a miracle of epiphany that can partly reveal the unity and wholeness of the world, in a bold attempt to look beyond the horizon and to see the unseen.

The sculptural composition “Tabor”, based on a topographic profile of the hill, along with a 3-D model on screen and photographs, represents yet another mode of approaching the perception of space. Pavel Florensky, who reflected on the problem of reverse perspective, wrote:

“...a geographic map both is and is not a representation — it does not replace the true image of the earth, not even in geometric abstraction, but only serves to point to a certain characteristic of the image ... A representation, no matter what principle is applied to establish whether points in the represented object match points in the representation, invariably only signifies, indicates, suggests, points in direction of the original.”⁶ Thus the model “points” to the hill, which, in turn, presumably emblematizes an original unseen to the eye. Pictures of reality accomplished and firmly secured in place, each of which is only a parcel of the visible world, together with the photographs and the 3-D model are no longer meaningless fragments of a broken mirror — they occupy an appropriate place in the synthetic worldview created by the artist. In terms of the different variants of perspective, all images, all “works” filling the space are akin to one word uttered in different languages. They all are connected through a single conceptual core, each one inseparably linked with the others the way linear and reverse perspectives complement each other. (Because lines converging at the horizon part again beyond that boundary.) Thus, a real space becomes filled with invisible lines of correspondence of images, essentially in agreement with the principle on which the creation of an icon in space, understood as a standard of sacred space, is based⁷.

The creation of such a space is a very complicated work. Perhaps this explains why the artist “does not practise installations”. External space as created by the artist is internalized through the viewer’s perception, becomes transformed itself, and affords to the viewer a glimpse of the new aspects of visible reality, inviting him or her to watch his/her own observation.

Thus, the space of Gor Chahal’s work is not a cerebrally-conceived space of linear perspective where the visible reality must be corrected for the sake of observing the relevant principles of representation, nor is it a chaos of self-expression; this is an attempt to create a new system of perception that encompasses and reconciles, organically, rationally and with mathematic precision, the known viewpoints.

A crumpled sheet with a drawing in the “Tabor” series indicates that achieving the ideal is desirable but impossible as yet: the ironic instruction of “how to understand oneself”. Here Gor Chahal situates himself as an heir to, and continuer of, early 20th-century Futurist ideas with their unprecedented daring and equally disarming humour.

1. 1985-1987: creation of a group (together with the poet Arkady Semenov and the rock group “Vezhlivy Otkaz”) called “Parallel Actions", which introduced poetic performance on the Moscow rock scene; 19871988: an arts association ‘Teatr-Post” established together with composer Kamil Chalaev and the band “Metro”; 1988: several projects accomplished in cooperation with an arts group “Chempiony Mira” (Champions of the World).
2. Chahal, Gor. “Arming the Eye”. In: “Khudozhestvenny Zhurnal” (Arts Magazine), No. 8, 1995. P. 10.
3. Svasian, Karen. The Poet and Critic in Rainer Maria Rilke's book “Sonnets to Orpheus". Moscow, 2000. P. 125.
4. Term coined by Alexei Lidov.
5. Ivashchenko, Igor. Yet Another Reflection on the ‘Unscientific Character’ of Reverse Perspective, or Application of Reverse Perspective in Photography. At: http://ye145.narod.ru.
6. Florensky, Pavel. Selective Works of Art. Reverse Perspective. Moscow, 1996.
7. Burckhardt, Titus. Sacred Art of the East and West. Moscow, 1999.

Back