The Bloodied Apollo: Painting’s Chaste Orgy
by Ivan Chechot
To the sweet and lustrous garden leads the star
There to greet you a lion maned with fire,
A blue ox with girth filled in with eyes
And the golden eagle there of Paradise
Remembrance of whose gaze is everlasting light.
The lines of this popular song not only stand in for the somewhat dated and local, Petersburg, flavour of their time so much as they make use of biblical vocabulary. They at once immerse us into a fabulous, lyrical, image of what we expect of paradise. They enkindle the motif of an encounter with the chaste spirits and bodies of these sacramental animals frolicking under grace’s golden sky.
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Dmitry Margolin’s new exhibition, aptly titled ‘The Streetwise and the Celestial’, cannot help but set before us paintings and sculptures that demand we reexamine the thematic encounters of men and women. This is related to Margolin’s massive sculptures ‘Figure of the Crucified Christ’, ‘Kouros’, ‘Christ-Apollo’ and ‘Dark Eve-Sophia’ (names I have given them myself).
Here I shall trace the motive of encounter and co-presence, a twosome nature in Dmitry
Margolin’s work. In this I shall glance through his engravings, consider his published drawings, and reexamine his paintings.
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In a painting that comes a little earlier than the sculptures, Lovers in a Landscape (2016), a man and a woman are fixed in the act of running towards one another. They are unattractive, no longer young, a little freakish (like drunks or drug addicts), they pay no heed to anything that surrounds them. In the bushes to the left is a dirty and extravagant rape, a murder transpires in the distance with barking and running dogs and the cries of a nurse. We are in some suburban ‘sanatorium’, or a rehab clinic. The couple are looking at each other with joy and intensity. The painting’s palette is bright and springlike.
This motif of the couple appears in the artist’s work virtually from his first exhibition. One can recall and appreciate his paintings of a mature man and woman in mundane settings, man and wife most likely (prototypes of the artist’s mother and father). Lives spent together have spent them out – from age or God knows what else. There is already here an implicit religious subtext. These paintings make up the cycle he calls Job and his Wife (2011-13). Man and wife who have had more than enough of each other, but they live on and on in a fate knit together. This fate and its domination bleeds into the tightness of the space and the heaviness of the palette.
In another painting, Veliky Ustyug, 15 Krasnaya St. № 16 (2014), the artist presents the marital pair in their living quarters before the glow of a television set. The male figure is no longer young, but has a formidable presence. Crutches rest on the chair behind him. She, with a rounded face and high cheekbones, a ponytail bunched up on the top of her head, leans on a rickety table with a cutting board. A rug with swans on it is tacked to the wall, indicating that these are perhaps not the town’s poorest citizens. The artist relates that he added the rug to give a coziness typical for such a scene and that it was not there ‘in nature’. A knight’s shield appears on the television, more than likely it is a showing of Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky. The light breaks through red, rusty curtains. The artist painted this couple several times together, separately, with different details, all in the same room. He added a wall clock, a lamp over the rug, and always the husband’s spectacles lying on the far end of the windowsill. To be together, ageing, wearying, eyes fixed on one point, playing out the film of a life spent together. This is how one might describe the subject matter of this expressive, symbolically rich scene of daily, domestic life. The artist has made this couple into something partly grotesque, but yet also imparting it with a certain grandeur, finding value and significance.
On his way to the Solovetsky Islands, the artist made several drawings in the small town of Kem’ on the banks of the White Sea. In Kem. 2014-16, Margolin often captures couples or simply fuses two heads, two half-figures, two women, two fellows, a man and a woman sitting on different ends of a bench.
I think that a single person occupying a distinct and defined settinghas no place in Dmitry Margolin’s creative work. The artist tends to depict a few, even many, figures. He seeks out crowds in spaces where people coexist, intersect and bunch together. And often these are groups of people and couples. One suspects that this is no mere extension of the art-school requirement of creating ‘compositional’ works, but comes from somewhere deeper. Rather it seems this is the artist’s experience of the crowded tumult of our mundane lives with its burdens and its blessings. Perhaps this is the self in its original understanding as a double, as a triple: ‘there is no “I” without mother and father’, without brothers and sisters, neighbours, classmates, rivals or doubles, without, in the end, God. This coupling and pairing of people, so it seems, must include then the possibility of encounter just as a meeting in its purest sense requires singleness, or a solitude, at is start. However Margolin’s work shows that he senses very acutely what an encounter means. And this, furthermore, always resembles the second meeting, after the first one that did not somehow find its proper end.
In 2016 Margolin created, in my mind, a very successful suite of six etchings on David and Bathsheba. This cycle is made up of different figures and scenes where, in two of them, one senses something of the Max Klinger. Here the man presents himself as the triumphant champion of the boudoirnext to his gaunt, frigid lady-friend cast in, so it would seem, deadening television light. He is then the old kingpressed up against a taut, pregnant belly, her head looming over him shrouded in a mysterious, crooked smile. He is the infant nurse beside the bed of the voluptuous wife, examining herself in the mirror, pregnant again. And finally a hobby horse for a small band female figures with victorious, raised hands. This final motif recalls the ancient prototype ‘Aristotle and Phyllis’ with a woman mounted on the bridled philosopher’s back. Indeed there are couples in ancient compositions as well. The Wedding of Dionysus and Ariadne (2016) is presented as a festive meeting, one that the bride does not anticipate; but proper to a god who is always ready for new encounters. Diana and Actaeon (2016) is another painting indirectly related to an encounter. According to the myth, this is a meeting which leads to the destruction of one of its participants. In fact, it matters not so much that Actaeon transgressed the law and transgressed the border of Diana’s sovereignty and chastity. Rather it is her revenge for the encounter, she hunts him down and at once is forever with him connected. This is how it looks in the painting and in the ancient and contemporary texts on the subject that convey the myth. The contents, however are different. In fact, the paintings, engravings and sculptures of this contemporary artist are not illustrations and not attempts to uncover the true sense of traditional themes. They have their own meanings taken from the artist’s life experience, taken from our times, and taken from torments and joys of both.
In some cases Margolin’s women stand over men with a question, a reproach, waving their sword of Damocles above him (consider, for example, Job and His Wife (2011, etching). On the other hand, in the etching Daniel Kharms, Hindrance (2012), a pathetic little man, mangy, in a jacket, kneels before a young beautiful girl, her vulva shamelessly visible through her clothes.
In another etching from this series Daniel Kharms, The Crone – II (2012, Etching), a foul, sinewy man in a mocking pose looks into the face of an elderly lady who appears to be a prostitute. She is either drunk, or already dead. In my opinion, this is one of his finest etchings.
The range of encounters in Margolin’s figurative world is wide and multivalent. There are encounters of love and marriage and those that turn into rape and murder, settled by the dominance of one over another, by humiliation and mutual degradation. Meetings can be anti-meetingsencounters of betrayal, such as that of Christ Taken into Custody and The Kiss of Judas. This subject is also about encounters that are no longer initial ones. Christ and Judas knew each other long before the kiss of betrayal, they were members of the same circle, the same community of apostles. Their final meeting was as fateful as a meeting of friends who have become foes.
In the large canvas Crucifixion (2016) two figures are standing next to the cross. They seem to be husband and wife. According to iconography, these two should be the Virgin Mary and St. John. In their place stand the ‘parents’, Mary, with garments in heightened tones, and what appears to be an elderly Joseph the carpenter – at least that is who he inevitably seems to me, though his presence is not mentioned in the Scriptures. Both figures are looking in one direction, these are figures in a pairing, and above them hangs the Son of God, and simply their son. They meet him in this most tragic of situations and see him as if for the first time.
Let us look at a few more of Margolin’s images of Christ made before his sculpture of the Christ-Kouros.
His figuration is traditional in scenes of the Nativity and the Worship of the Magi. The swaddled infant here is a glowing bundle. Margolin’s Christ appears also in the expressionist paintings of his Passion cycle. Let us assemble some of the motifs from his paintings and engravings associated with the Passion.
Here, in one, he gazes at what happens before him with wide-opened eyes. His complexion is cadaverous and dark. On either side the thieves are painted in all sorts of flesh tones.
The impression of Christ is completely different – a white and grey bony corpse covered in bruises and traces of beatings.
For Margolin, Christ’s eyes are always open. In a number of cases Christ is ugly with an gainly body and a large dark mask of a head. In others he has a nearly black, shaggy figure and a hazy silhouette.
There is also another form: an average-sized fellow with parted hair and an attentive gaze. A typical fellow.
Especially ‘effective’ (what else can one say, such is the consequence of expressionism) is when Christ, extending his arms in ecstasy, embraces the world. Like Icarus, soaring into the sky, a desperate and credulous diver into the abyss. The ecstatic contour of Christ’s body is present in both the artist’s paintings and in his etchings. Christ was at once a congealed knot of pain and a star-wound, fully within the spirit of expressionism and Western mediaeval mysticism alike.
Such were Margolin’s images of him before he took up sculpture and moulded his first Christ. Suspended on the bare wall, crucified, but soaring in space. Then he was simply the Kouros, a name once given Apollo (from our art history we can recall the ‘Apollo of Tenea’). A crucified, small, tender, unathletic man, resembling northern European peasant sculpture of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, helplessly borne up to the heavens. But the Kouros is different – he appeared and arose, he heads towards us, unflinchingly, like a young soldier, a bridegroom.
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It is impossible to say why this artist over a period of time set painting and engraving aside and took on the laborious and grimy work of sculpture. Of course he was attracted to the prospect of creating real volume, the possibility of being liberated from the two dimensions of drawing, which, no matter what you do, still remain in the realm of signs cast in silhouette, shade, stain, and the like. To make your own kouros! Seeing him in the studio, approaching him at close range, putting your hand on his breast is to realise with delight that he is present there in that space, on his own – like you yourself, each living their own life, always the other, each on his own. For the sake of this encounter the artist took up the ‘task of Rabbi Loew’. Many recall their first impression of when this kouros settled himself in Margolin’s austere studio. Now not only was Dmitry living there, but Christ on the wall and this white young fellow of poured stone.
The artist was intrigued by the task of creating new reality, looking for a sharper sense of a decisive separation of the work from the author, sharper than what takes place in an image set on a planar scale that requires the viewer to be drawn in by its fictive depth. The Kouros emerged right here, in his hands. It was first a framework, then a rough shape, and then an extended arm, a round, firm rear pushing out into space. He comes to meet you, a real, honest thing, other and at the same time like you. However, sculpture as such – merely volume where all else is accomplished by light and the rotation of the viewer – could not on its own captivate the artist. Both Christ and the Kouros were painted in the style of a painter, with layers of shading and tone. Their eyes sparkled, the face, mouth were played with life. They could not go without bloody wounds in the side, stigmata on the hands and feet. The result was a kind of sculptural painting. Generally speaking this was something new, beyond the requirements (the so-called laws) of traditional forms of art. This is not a ‘coloured object’, not a ‘polychrome sculpture’. Here we have an unlicensed simulacrum born from the anarchic coupling of sculpture and painting, slipping away from established models.What results is an amalgam of two natures. Proportions are not evenly sculptural as they are in parts expressive, in parts plastic, and as a whole executed in a mimetic and coloristic manner where movement is greater than stability and architectonics play no role whatsoever. This is ‘dilettante’ sculpture, the sculpture of a painter and for painting. The painting is done as a painter would do it on a plane, with expressionistic strokes. But that is not what matters most. It seems to me that significance comes in striving towards a synthetic, diverse life for the image in space.Elements of colour and emotion – no, rather, sensation and colour– are inexorable from this space, conveying its sense of fullness and freedom in the image.
Indeed sculpture and its laconic quality has a role in Margolin’s creativity in general, directing his search along the path from expression to harmony, as we see in the Christ-Apollo. Metaphorically, one may put it this way: the Kouros (Greece), taking on colour and pain, ‘gave birth’ to Christ. And here he is, coming to us in what amounts to an encounter, as I have said many times already. The Christ-Kouros, wounded, bloodied is in the model of ‘Ecce Homo‘, ‘This is the Man’. All these transformations may be understood in the sense that the Christ-Man and the Christ-Sculpture held concealed within them Adam and Apollo. As Adam, Christ is warm, physical. As Apollo he is pure, white and stern.
But the process of engendering images did not stop there. The artist, as a demiurge, wanted to give the Kouros a helpmate, as God gave one to Adam, Christ has the Bride, and Apollo … but who to give to Apollo? Daphne, Echo, the nymph of shadow? This last figure, Apollo, clearly adds to the layered symbolism of the other figures an impenetrability (Noli me tangere) and sovereignty, a decidedly internal centrality and even a certain neutrality in relation to everything that occurs on the outside of him. This Apollinian hue suits perfectly the image of Christ as expressed in his mystery.
…That was moulded and filled with eyes through painting. A surprising, dark, oriental female figure. Both statues stand independently on rotating pedestals. They can be turned toward one another, they can be parted and turned in different directions, set on parallel courses to catch up with each other eventually, one made to lead, one to follow. It is superb that this is possible. The figures’ movement evokes the dancing machines of Daedalus, speaking of the couple’s universality as models of the dialectics of human relations.
Having played out these figures in the studio, Margolin returned anew to painting and created on a large canvas what could be a perfect setting for the idealised encounter between this wedding couple. This was his The Bridegroom and His Bride and it, indubitably, represents Paradise. However this is not the Paradise before the Fall of Adam, but at the end of time, when the Saviour finds His Church, enters Her and then, with the Church and the New Heaven, becomes all.
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Let us focus more narrowly on the sculptures one-by-one, become aware of their deeper sense. They, after all, are very important to the artist himself.
The Apollo-Christ is autonomous, muscular, handsome. There’s something about the boy in him. Indeed, he is prohibitively shy for a kouros, and utterly free of pride or an active origin. Taking the same statue as Christ forces one to see the sacrificial kouros in the young manLike Christ he is stern and at once open and closed. The gesture of his hands is directed to a person, he takes the gesture to himself and gives it from himself, from his generosity. One recalls the words of the Saviour: ‘Suffer little children and forbid them not to come unto me…’ It is very easy to see in the statue just the kouros, a young fellow. The machine and doll of the body is not concealed, the frame and parallel lines in the design stick out. In his contour there is something unconscious in him, erect and unintentionally proudAnd all this clothed with a pleasant bodily softness which stems either from the lightness of skin tone, or from the Christ, or from another ‘paired’ person the milk on whose lips is not yet dry. Actually making a Christ is not an easy subject once a sculptor has fallen in love with antiquity. He is either too much the muscled athlete, or the refined, anaemic pretty-boy, or too cold, or, on the other hand, maudlin and and transparent, like I. G. Dannecker’s lovely sculptures of the classical era (by which I mean his statue in the Chapelle pavilion in Tsarskoe Selo, now in the Hermitage). Indeed, how to make Christ good, but not congenial, embodied, but not coupled and seductive, not decorous, but majestic, but more than majestic, indeed, divine? For the old masters, including Michelangelo (Il Renditore in Rome) it was no easier than it was in the nineteenth century, much less the twentieth.
The hero here is the Risen Christ. This means the crucified, suffering, dead, buried, released from the tomb Christ who now heads towards an encounter with us. The first who meets him is a girl. Perhaps for her he is merely a ghost, a vision. She takes a decisive step in his direction, her hands extended towards him, fingers spread. Does she wish to touch the Lord? All these motifs are related in St. Mary Magdalen who met the Risen Christ in the form of gardener early on the morning of the Resurrection. Such a subject attracted many western artists. Dürer gave Christ a spade in his ‘Small Passions’, Hans Baldung Grien did the same with a more painterly flair in his Christ the Gardner‘ (1539, Darmstadt).
The sculptures of the kouros and the girl, relatively independent of one another form a group with different meanings pertinent to each. They can be interpreted not only in a Christian fashion but as Cupid and Psyche, and Apollo and his nymph (Echo, or Daphne). For this it is enough to rotate the figures, set the man in front and the woman behind; or, conversely, to turn the girl’s figure so that Apollo is chasing after her. In the Greek myth after the antics with the oil lamp Eros (love) and Psyche (the soul) were reunited by Zeus’ will. At the start Psyche (like Elsa from Lohengrin) had no right to know who her groom was or even to see him. However, the myth ends with a complete fusion of soul and love, the fruit of whose marriage was the goddess Volupia (Latin Voluptas) – the embodiment of voluptuousness and pleasure, love overflowing with eros and the eros ensouled.
The girl or young woman, the bride, as the artist himself calls her, does not look at all like an untouched maiden, neither literally nor in the sublime, spiritual sense of the word Virgin. To lay out other words that run through the brain when you ‘glance’ over it – and it is so fashioned and detailed that it is impossible not to succumb to voyeurism – you find extraordinary combinations and modulations, the origins of which lie in modern mass culture. There is no escaping this, and in searching for beauty in life – and not in a Museum or with a semiologist – you have to first recognise its virulence. Then it must be deprived of the elements of the coldness of the product, you must sublimate and elevate the low. We evoke such words as ‘mulatta’, ‘mannequin’, ‘a well-groomed lady’, ‘model’, and maybe even ‘nightclub’. Then there is ‘manicure’, ‘pedicure’, ‘peeling, stretching and Pilates’, ‘the high-dollar intimate styling’, ‘tanning salon’, cool ‘makeup’ and even the ‘do’– the ‘hairdo’, ‘do-up’ the chin or the eyes. Perhaps there is also something ‘done up’ in the narcotic dilation of the beauty’s eyes, and in her slightly frazzled appearance. ‘Done out’, ‘done over’, ‘done up’.
But no, here there can be none of that! This is at least Magdalene, or Pharaoh’s noble daughter. Her outlines are set deep in the layers of a memory filled up with history and sublimity, with an appreciation for ancient Egypt. The Pushkin Museum’s ‘Wooden Spoon for Anointing’, with its handle made in the form of a diving girl, was not for a make-up, but for sacred cosmetic rituals. Dark olive skintone evokes associations with embalming, with the Book of the Dead, with Isis and Osiris (the latter always in white as the colour of the funeral shroud). And here again that impudent spirit of Mephistopheles points to empirical reality: a ‘hang loose’ gesture, ‘drying her nails’ after a manicure, a meticulous ‘depilation’ job.
This is, of course, the first Eve, the modern Eve, and then it is something much more spiritual, and even utterly spiritualistic. The name Eve, and the word ‘chava‘ from which it comes means, incidentally, ‘the source of life’. In Islam there is a version that this word refers to a red russet colour of a dark shade, perhaps indicating the colour of a swarthy body and the colour of the earth.
For us, the earth is not only one of the four elements of ancient natural philosophy, it is also the rubbish of modern civilisationIn the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, no small amount of art has been made from rubbish, and artists are more often apologists for it than they are its critics. Very rare that garbage is taken as earth from which by beneficiation (a mining term) you can extract something valuable. One of the Margolin’s strategies as an artist is, in my opinion, ‘the work from the black’ and the ‘red’, the nigredo. In the everyday and in the street, in the low and repulsive he is ready to find the beauty of the material, ore to mould into noble art. What conditions the latter is not the choice of noble materials or themes, but an unoccluded, pure perspective.
The Bride is intentionally executed in thick paint. The statue is dainty, charming, awkwardly graceful. It is beautiful and different from different sides, in different lighting. And most surprisingly, as an image it is completely pure! Yes, she looks you in the eyes, almost fawning, she wants to please, and how charmingly genuine it is that she does. In the end one must see in its shape not so much ‘fashion’ as the splendour, the elegance of love. She is naive and virginal, but she has a sex, and it is a real womanhood – undeniable and intoxicating. For us it is no complicated, dissembling gender. Incidentally, Christ-Apollo’s sex is barely noticed, a clay miniature, as in the statues of the ancient gods and Donatello’s ‘David’, that of a plump and awkward boy. Margolin’s Christ has something of the old battle-axe about him, thick-thighed and with a womanish face. He is just like the girl, fashionable and silly, a fop and a naïf. The first is one who ‘women lost their heads over and men called a fop but secretly envied‘ (from Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, emphasis is the author’s); the second is the exact opposite of the first – it is the figure’s invincible spontaneity.
The painting «The Bridegroom and His Bride»
In the background of a large emerald green canvas, reminiscent of a bright fleecy carpet, there is the fountain of life, eternal youth, around which animals are strolling: a blue horse and two deer. In the foreground our attention is drawn to a bull in dark violet, a tiger with cubs, birds. All the animals have their little onesThe cat with kittens, the tigress has her cubs. Margolin comments: this means that the people depicted here will also have children, but their love will be in all its fullness. Special emphasis is given to the animals’ eyes, they all indeed have a gaze. Some are given in pairs, like two herons of different shades in the background. The crocodile nearly dissolves into the greenery, open-mawed with unblinking eyes. Then there are the brilliantly coloured birds, perhaps pheasants. It seems they have walked out of an old master painting. The background of the space in the left part of the picture is closed by a thick green copse, on which hang plump yellow and rubicund apples. To me, this emerald wall with large glossy leaves recalls much the art of old, but especially the baroque park paintings of Somov that have the bosquets of Tsarskoye Selo cast in the white nights of the far north, or at dusk. The beautiful sky at the top right with its languid shimmering and sweet longing.
In the centre of the composition: a meeting. We meet our old friend: the kouros, Apollo, Christ. His figure illuminates in the painting’s tinted dusk. Impulsively rushing toward him is She, our dark, Egyptian maiden. Her figure against the dark background seems even thinner than in the sculpture. An awkward, wooden girl, sincere to the point of naivité, and hot with desire, it seems she’s just about to grasp Christ’s hand. The artist himself says that he depicts here not just a meeting, but a very important one, the most important love meetingChrist and the Church, Christ and the New Eve, Christ and the Wisdom of God. The whole future of the world depends on this meeting, of humanity and of the Saviour himself. Margolin says that their entry into one another (which here he does not directly show), their love, must be shown as a fully human act, in the spirit and in the style of the Song of Solomon.
The painting has indeed been given in a luxurious style, in a jewel-like palette. Yet at once it is also dominated by a placid tranquility, the leaves are not rustling, the beasts breathing evenly. The protagonists preserve a certain restraint, even timidity. I think, as such a complex theological subject, the union of Christ with his Bride the Church after the end of the world has never been presented with such a besotted iconography, with such sensuality of colour, warmth of air, with such chaste voluptuousness. Margolin’s painting is decorative, but not only that, it is ‘primitivist’, but also free of all formulaism, full of plasticity and an exquisite scent. This is a ‘romantic work’, the expressionist Margolin here has stepped backstage. What is most important is sensibility, emotion, filled with emotive tenderness. The animals remind one a bit of Franz Mark, but with out the demonism. They are not crystals of limpid stone, no death haunts them here. The animals have been transported beyond the bounds of time. The painting reminds me of some of the works of Margolin’s great predecessors in terms of its spontaneity, love, orotundity and mystery. His toll-keepers are Rousseau and Blake with their tamed monsters and voluptuous chaste virgins and youths. There is nothing at all wrong with the fact that the painting did not come off completely, and that it has something in common with those felt wall-carpets with swans. Margolin’s art is too alive and quivering to be perfect, too hot to win over a Beckmesser.
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Here we would like to present a few uplifting patristic citations related to the theme which our painter and sculptor has conveyed in such a free, poetic manner. After reading these excerpts, look at his images again, not only those that are discussed in detail, here but also at others presented at the exhibition. I would venture this might enrich your understanding and at once sharpen some other questions that might arise.
‘And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.’ (Gen. 2.25) (Ветхий Завет).
By beauty understand the splendour of the soul: not that which hand could write or time despoil, but that seen by the eyes of a chaste mind. (St. Gregory Nazianzen, 16, 203).
God is both the bridegroom and the archer. He treats the purified soul as a bride and as the shaft aimed at a good target. He allows his bride to participate in his eternal incorruptibility… (St. Gregory of Nyssa)
He girded in chastity lives under the light of a clear conscience for the lamp of boldness illumines a life where the soul from the font of truth dwells in vigilance and does not succumb to deception, not driven to madness by any senseless ravings. (St. Gregory Nazianzen).
Whoever has seen even a particle of chastity – marvellous and above all comeliness – and has not been captivated by love himself, he must, in my judgement, be ranked among those who are not lovers beauty. (St. Isidore of Pelusium, 60, 286).
That land is of the living where night does not exist and where there is no sleep, the imitator of death. In that abode there is no material eating and drinking – the adjuncts of our frailties. There are no sicknesses, no pains, no medicines, no courts of law, no businesses, no crafts, and no money – the beginning of evils, the subject of wars, and the root of enmity. It is the land of the living, not of the dying out of sin, but of those living the true life in Christ Jesus. (St. Basil the Great).
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In Holy Scripture the relationship between God and the person or God and a people is very often depicted in the the imagery of marriage. The Covenant itself often carries with its the nature of a marriage contract. Israel’s infidelity to the Covenant is always being compared with fornication and adultery […]
In the New Testament, when Christ establishes the new Covenant in His blood, the Covenant acquires its final completeness: the fullness and indissoluble unity of the Divine Lamb and his Bride the Church. Christ calls himself the Bridegroom of the bridechamber (Matth. 9:15), and his mission is the bridal feast. […] The Apostle Paul in his ecclesiology develops the conception of the Church as the Body whose head is Christ. We are all made up of one Body where each member has its purpose. There is a unity of many members in one Body. The nature of entering the Church is the entry into Her Body. ‘I am the vine and you are the branches,’ says Christ (Jn. 15.5). And just as Eve is born from Adam’s rib, so is the Church born from the Saviour’s pierced side. […] Husband and wife are an inseparable unity, becoming one flesh. No longer two, but one flesh. Like the body of Christ! […] Husband and wife constitute an indivisible Whole, like the Church with Christ… If the wife refuses to obey the husband, they lose the basis of their nature – for Eve was born of the rib and, rejecting her husband in willfulness, rejects her own nature. It is also necessary that husbands love their wives, as Christ loves the Church and this means to the end, even unto death. Then wives shall have faith in their husbands. In this way the Covenant connects us to God not only through some conditional contract, but penetrates every aspect of our lives to our very essence, like the bonds of marriage. Amen. (Fr. Vasiliy Zazdravnykh).
About Dmitry Margolin
- Socially
A paid government employee, a school teacher. A family man, without real estate or inheritance (save for his genes and cultural traditions). From the Soviet intelligentsia. He sits in his studio and ‘paints’, sculpts, draws, and prints. He is an artist, surrounded by his students, and does not spend too much time with friends. One would be lucky to find five who give a good assessment of him. He sits and ‘paints’ and says that after an hour and a half of work, all is well. Sometimes when he crawls his way out, he asks: ‘Why does no one need me?’ ‘Why don’t I sell anything?’ But these questions are again drowned out in paint, squeezed out by the amassing canvases, unless another painful question arises: ‘Why does the work of other artists turn out so alive, beautiful, truthful – artists like Rembrandt, Velásquez, even Jan Sten? Is my faith in art less than theirs, the images that appear before me weaker, my hand cruder, my head in a fog?’
- Culture, education, interests
Heir to the Soviet and post-Soviet intelligentsia and Perestroika. A reader of serious books. Reflective. Speaks beautifully. His formal education is fully in the arts, that of the Arts Academy, of St. Petersburg. He has not spent much time abroad and set the ‘contemporary’ to the side. His interests go beyond the conventional. They include painting and religion (if the latter can truly be called that). He is an active and earnest member of an Orthodox parish. Teaches a catechism class. He understands the shortcomings of his awareness in the diversity in art and willingly seeks to fill the gaps. Interested in theology. Critical of official Church policy and pseudo-culture. Not an intellectual, fashionista, dandy, or a terrorist. Minimally represented on social networks. Politically ‘liberal’ and probably not a ‘patriot’, but rooting for Russia. A Petersburger on all counts. You could not make a Moscow artist out of him even if you registered him at an address on the Lenin Hills.
- Nature and Temperament
By nature lively, cheerful. Well regarded by young ladies and full-grown men. Quick to smile and laugh. Also well-known (among his students) for loud and caustic remarks. A hard worker who does much with his hands. Undiscouraged, an optimist. But needs support. This he receives from a few friends and, of course, his wife. Margolin does not speak of her often, but when he does it is clear that the ‘Wisdom of God’ is on her side. Without the feminine foundation, charming all that surrounds it, it is unlikely that he could live and ‘paint’. In his nature he has nothing of the labourer, nor of the soldier, nor is he an ascetic, a pedant, a nomothete. Yet he is tenacious, persistent and driven. Apollo and Dionysius are mixed in his blood in equal proportions. His Dionysius is torn apart only in the imagination. His Apollo is not a murderer. His Russianness and Jewishness stand behind one another, one cooling the other, one heating. But the disquiet, the fire of both flares up in the effort to test extremes in painting and the imagination. He thirsts for Harmony and Salvation. He thirsts for peace of mind in the full riot of life and creative work.
Conclusion.
What is essential to art for Margolin?
For Dima, it seems to me, what is most central is what is traditionally called, though not often enough, ‘images’. His images are always of someone and something, and he always strives not just to depict and bear the object in mind but that it take place in the picture. Once the image has been established it must then have its own momentum, its internal complexity, and diverse members. All this must be seen, concretely depicted and unique. Perhaps he would even claim that the image will come to have its own mythic allure and draw us into it. For Dima the ‘quality of painting’ is very important, but not for itself and certainly not for ‘commercial presentation’, but by the virtue of its own content. He is in no sense a designer, a stylist, and yet neither a conceptual inventor. In my opinion, quality for him is something that can grab the viewer by the throat and shake them.
As a man and as a painter, Dmitry is extremely direct, he sees his art always as if for the first time. This ability to catch fire and leap into action is an invaluable talent. This is plain to anyone who has heard his laughter and manner of speaking, he is rich and generous in both. For him the departure from academic art is a decisive break with formalism, with duty-bound procedures and emasculated pseudo-mastery. His directness sometimes keeps Margolin from making ends meet, but it also distinguishes him from many others, especially against the background of the current and general fashionable relativism, veganism and hackneyed ideas.
The first and most superficial layer of this directness is in Margolin’s pull toward spontaneity in the spirit of expressionism and primitivism. This comes out in a certain caricature and grotesquery in his figuration. The apposite of this is his utterly direct pull toward the beauty of painting and a number of organic motifs. Thus we have the louche beauty of scenes of debauchery, murder, and in scenes of bliss. The artist does not shrink from such beauty, sensing it acutely and sincerely and fearlessly scuffles on the border of trash and kitsch. But this is only superficial directness. His actual directness has, it would seem, a deeper source. This is the goodness and generosity of the soul, her ardour toward the lovely. The directness of the good, on whose side this artist stakes his claim, making even his orgiastic, monstrous or sardonic scenes something chaste.
The indecency of Margolin’s paintings and sculptures comes not from their bold motifs but that they are too indecently revelatory, indecently sincere for contemporary secular societyThese are confessional works, revelatory lyric, repentance and declaration in love and aloud to and in front of the world. His paintings – huge, rich and direct – are not set for the parlour or a gallery-salon where gather the sceptical public. It is hard to imagine them in today’s vain market for ‘serious art’, for so much are they written with an almost childlike joy of working with paint, with so much faith that we must conjure up some other word with more sincerity in it than any we have now. Indeed these works of art are not addressed to experts or the élite. They will be of interest to many, from children to ‘backward pensioners’, from those looking for sharp impressions to those accustomed to deep contemplation.
How to become wise while remaining direct? How to ward off the temptation of that despondency called middle age? How to get away from the bald calculus of success and even the calculus of perfection? Perhaps the bloodied Apollo may help? But could it be the calculating Apollo, with his laws, modes, proportions, intervals, and forms that boils in the blood of the artist?
There is no Apollo at all in the blood. There basks and plays a child, ripens a cheerful sacrifice, his blood has a Russian lad and the spices of the middle east, as Vasily Rozanov had it. Here Apollo is merely a supporting character, a medium for expressing a different ideal. In the true pagan Apollo one would hardly hear the rush of blood. He knows no pain or collapse, he only suffers regular bouts of angst from the inaccessibility of an abstract object of desire, from the eternal inconsistencies of dances and ditties that do not suit his rigid constraints. Margolin’s bloody kouros is a double image: a symbol of the twilight of Apollo, but also his new sunrise, already as a man suffering in holiness. The presence of this Apollo, his distantiation and sovereignty, are the foundation and guarantee of chastity. Yet this is such chastity as that which plays the role of a frame for the appearance of immediate life in the unity of love, in the synthesis of pattern and color, male and female principles according to the law of Divine Economy.
***
“It is extreme purity to hold all persons in the same regard as inanimate things” (St. John of the Ladder).
This strict definition of chastity is not for our artist or his images. They are never like inanimate objects. Life plays in them. Their purity does not exclude their sensual physicality. Dmitry’s paintings are real feasts, orgies of colour and flesh, in them all restrictions are removed, and there are no taboos. But, for the orgy, as skilfully writes a great historian of religion and mythology: “…their excesses fill a definite and useful role in the economy of the sacred. They break down the barriers between man, society, nature and the gods. Theyhelp force life and the seeds of things to move from one level to another, from one zone of reality to the rest. What was emptied of substance is replenished; what was shattered into fragments becomes one again; what was in isolation merges into the great womb of all things. The orgy sets flowing the sacred energy of life. […] Man hopes, by identifying himself with formless, pre-cosmic existence, to return to himself restored and regenerated, in a word, a “new man”. The very nature and function of the orgy indicate that it reproduces the original act of Creation, ordering Chaos.(Mircea Eliade.Patterns in Comparative Religion, 1958, emphasis is the author’s).
Dmitry’s picturesque orgies – the sensuality of his Bride and Bridegroom, his immersion in the lowlands of the body and soul in paintings of debauchery that derive no less from the purity of nature and of the artist’s thoughts than this – all these appear as a cleansing carnivalThey are not frights, they are played out under the artist’s strict control marked by a lively sense of humour and inspiration. This carnival awakens forces of regeneration, forces of life. And this is so worthwhile, so encouraging against, in Pushkin’s line, the backdrop of ‘lush nature withering’ that marks Petersburg’s graceful cultural autumn in our days.
Tsarskoe Selo, 2018
From The Streetwise and the Celestial. St. Petersburg: Svoe Izdatelstvo, 2018.