"Wish we lived like this:"
folklore


A next in turn Batynkov's project concerning another life.
What Batynkov is making is - fairly easy, readable and often when he wants it to be - delicate, extremely variational with as it might seem inevitable dissolving of the author's style. Yet, despite of the author's endeavors it never occurs. Batynkov works vigorously and abundantly motivating his creative issues with exclusively inner inspiration needs. According to his initial promise he was to make 50-odd canvases for "ANOTHER LIFE" exhibition. Within a couple of months! To his foreign colleagues, tightly engaged in the real dynamic art-market mechanism, this amount is a common rate, they will appreciate his 'Stakhanov' exploits. However they will hardly understand it. Such titanism is abounding with them being required by the situation, moreover Batynkov is of completely different cultural space, another life.
In Krokin gallery there have already been performed two projects by the author who is by no means overconscious about the technical part of the process. They were colour photography, graphic arts and now it is painting.
This is superficial chatter though, about the mechanism at best, but the intrigue is not in the reserved attitude of Batynkov towards means of conveying things, neither in the quality of this conveyance. No, not at all. Batynkov is not faced with the dilemma between "what" and "why" by definition. The phenomenon of his author identification becomes apparent in another category which is more essential - presence in the art space or out of it at the equidistant length, rapture of form or complete indifference to it, dissolving in the contents or in generally non-motivated doing.

Less than all Batynkov is an artist-author, he is a curator who shares his authorship with someone else. This is what he has recently declared with one of his numerous projects. First of all he is a curator of his own ideas, he is interested in the process itself, the dialogue which implies the presence of an opponent, an antithesis. But a conventional opponent will remain conventional; what is "common" and what is "strange" is unclear, it does not matter though (by analogy with the "Common - strange" project of the beginning of the year in the Krokin Gallery). Batynkov is both inside the situation and beyond it, he's a programmer and a user at a time. He reproduces some reality, simulates his attitude towards it and his position. "Another life" is a new plot, a new product of intelligence, however about the same.

"Another life" is an antithesis; it's an endeavor to return all to its natural place. An effort to understand, an effort with original failure. Batynkov wants to return within the frames of graphics as the basis of visual culture, being tired of his own profanations on this topic. M. Duchan in his days screwed off a urinal in one of European WCs, called it a fountain and with no hint of doubt dignified it a piece of art subscribing it with an invaluable signature of his, and K. Batynkov returned it (figuratively) to its place of origin in a most blasphemous way. Batynkov takes to good old painting regarding it as the one that preserves the verbal adequacy of the present days, the ones abounding in conceptual multicomplexity and new technologies. All is hand made, all is "vruchnuju", all is original, a bit clumsy yet earnestly and boldly. Batynkov paints not the reality but an image of it, its reverse side, the one not laminated in plastics, devoid of artificial polycolor synthetics. On almost monochrome surfaces he pictures some ageographic "countryside-wise" antiutopia, possible in comparison with a real utopia, the one we watch now directly now from another side and now from another life. City lights, gloss of cars, plastic beauties and compulsory vaccinations: this is all what Batynkov is constructively opposed to what is left beyond his picture.

"Another Life" is a project about "culture park" which is always nearby and available but isolated by means of a delicate fence just in case. One may swim in a pool, climb up the space nonexpendable yet used-once-and-for-all "Buran", swing oneself (secured by a supporter) down the watch-tower considering oneself Tarzan and to remain nobody. There is a bulk of plots. Heroic grimace is not appreciated there, and the heroic spirit itself is merged with staffage, the distance between great and misery is vague and "Channel" and "chenille" are deemed to be the notions of one rate.