Plinth

In the video work Twilight (2005), which showed at Birmingham’s Ikon gallery in 2006, for example, red traffic lights are reflected as green in rain-soaked roads. Some of the pedestrians walking by do not cast shadows or they disappear when they go behind a pillar. The series Ruins of the Industrial (2013-2022) again sees everyday urban life manipulated, this time literally – metres-long excerpts of steel railway track are warped and twisted, tied into knots. The 2013-2023 series Pieces of Metal also uses steel, big sheets that appear crumpled like pieces of paper, but actually hang flat, flush to the wall. Thrown off by visual tricks and ruptures, the viewer is ultimately invited to look at ways of looking.

Logutov was born in 1980 in Samara, Russia, and his work is held in major public galleries (the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the FRAC Bretagne Museum in France and many others). Not long after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the artist left Russia and relocated to London. Already full of dislocations, Logutov’s work is imbued with whole new resonances given both the current geopolitical landscape and the artist’s personal one.

The Meetings paintings, for instance, are limbo-like and evoke the possibilities of space. Space here refers to the illusion of depth and the surface area of the canvas; both, so not quite either. One (shown above) could be an empty room with a picture window, the curtains partially drawn. Another (below) could be a two-tone rug or a table as if seen from above. Others recall the exhibition spaces they are hung in.

No matter how abstract or figurative the works in Meetings become, the act of painting them ‘has become like a meditation for me,’ Logutov says, having returned to this series frequently throughout his career. Indeed, preferring to work without tape, a significant amount of concentration is required to achieve such clean lines and clear blocks of colour.

‘In a way, the visual language reminds me of the Russian avant-garde, Malevich and Matyushin,’ Logutov says. While the watercolours bear a passing resemblance to Suprematist compositions in their arrangement of geometrical shapes, there is none of the ‘Sail forth!’ idealism of Kazimir Malevich. Rather, Logutov’s work is turned towards the world, human and empirical. A comparison with Mikhail Matyushin bears more fruit – Logutov shares his curiosity about sight as a human sense and in the daily rhythms of apprehending space. In some of the Meetings paintings, the soft, ‘low-chroma’ tones recall Matyushin’s Movement in Space (c. 1923) – a work composed of bands of colour that indeed appear to shuffle and vibrate, for which the artist employed cheap pigments used at that time to paint the façades of buildings[1].

Logutov’s palette seems selected in a similarly democratic spirit – ‘watercolours are neutral’, as a medium, he says. Indeed, these works preference ambience and lightness over the drama of, say, acrylic or oil. The colours are free to resound like muted chords. While the arrangement of shapes at times evokes the simple geometry of rooms, the colours are built of their own scaffolding. Often, too-bright, thin poles of intermediary colour intersect a couple of the quieter, milkier ones and keep the whole composition coasting around the canvas.

Where Malevich had his black square, the common element in Logutov’s Meetings is a much breezier, bright four-sided shape, typically a rectangle. At times, this gives the impression of light hitting a back wall, and at others, ‘the glow of the screen’. ‘I think of the rectangle as a screen. (It could be a phone or computer screen — or maybe a video projector at an exhibition — but the canvas is like a screen, too),’ Logutov says, ‘Meetings is about paying attention to the screen itself, before there is any image on it.’

Yes, the subject matter of Meetings is mediation itself. ‘The white rectangles are like a potential piece of art,’ says Logutov. ‘My interest is in the relationship between a conditional viewer and a conditional work of art.’ This is why he says he is drawn so keenly towards visual paradoxes that disrupt the viewing experience and keep interpretation open. His artistic gestures share DNA with the old thought experiment about the tree falling in a forest: no work of art without a viewing, and vice versa.

As such, each viewing is a different kind of meeting. The watercolours have a live quality, which is underscored by Logutov’s tendency to treat them as a kit-of-parts to be playfully reconfigured in different exhibitions. For the artist, who also has extensive experience as a curator, ‘an exhibition is a work of art’ in itself. ‘It seems to me that the history of art has become the history of exhibitions, and not the history of works, as it was before,’ he says. Logutov is right to question the meaning of artworks and how we receive them in such a visually saturated landscape. ‘Every day we see a lot of art, which is mediated in different ways,’ whether it be via a phone screen, perhaps a billboard in the street, a living room TV screen, or a museum space. ‘So, I try to depict this distance.’

Another kind of distance is time. For the exhibition Next Level, ‘I was thinking about the cycles of a painting’s life. It’s painted, then it goes to a museum, before eventually it lands in the memory.’ Enacting the partial impressions that artworks leave us with, Logutov delights in digitally collaging previous works and exhibitions, while adding new marks, to create new works. ‘Memory is not a photographic capture of reality – we add our own associations.’

If you’ve got a keen eye for such gaps how could your work ever be finished? Logutov’s is one long, recursive project. Meetings might seem provisional, but that’s because life is too. All we have is our intuition and there is no better time than now to sharpen it. Who knows which rooms, which artworks, and under what circumstance we’ll be meeting in next.

By Sammi Gale

With special thanks to Sasha Shevchenko.

Cover image: Vladimir Logutov. From the Meetings series, 2023. Watercolour and colour pencil on cotton paper. 36 x 51cm

See available works by Vladimir Logutov

1. Zhadova, Larisa. 2007. Cvetovaja sistema Mikhaila Matyushina [Matyushin’s color system]. In Spravochnik po tsvetu: Zakonomernost’ izmenyayemosti tsvetovykh sochetany [A Reference Book of Color: The Laws Governing Variability of Color Combinations]. Moscow: D. Aronov, pp. 5–12. (In Russian)