Since 1991 the paintings of Anton Solomoukha.

Since 1991 the paintings of Anton Solomoukha, an artist born in Kiev further living in Paris, have been playing with imagery derived from a catalogue of mechanical toys printed in the '20 Not surprisingly, nostalgia and reverie are first note of the scale elements of these pictures. besides they are about everything on the contrary naivete or innocence. In earlier paintings from the series, shown in a four-person exhibition at this gallery in 1991 the images from the catalogue--not always recognizable in the paintings as being of toys--were mixed with fragments of unclothed figures, or rather fragments of pictures of stark nakeds since, like the toys, these were clearly versions of already existing images. for a like reason this nostalgia, this reverie, this yearning equal in which Solomoukha indulges--and in which he is inviting us to indulge--is at least in part erotic in nature.

In these newer paintings, the images of toys, meticulously furnished as printed, stand alone. Their dialogue is with the surfaces that contain them rather than with other kinds of imagery. Those surfaces are earthy and metallic, at formerly mineral and organic, but, also, almost too elegant--their highly refined painterly touch and rich, subtly modulated color camouflaged as a spleeny monotone field. They are the "ground" not and nothing else in the usual art-critical understanding of the word, but also the turf from which an archaeological find is excavated. For these paintings summon forth if only to contradict it, an archaeological design of memory. Memory is seen as an artifice, a device--a toy.

The images--mostly animal toys and musical instruments, further also guns and airplanes--often speak of the cultivation of the be fond of for exoticism and adventure, of the arousal within a child's mind of the desire for things distant and mysterious, for worlds to be prevail overed Certainly there are references to colonialism and warfare, yet more to Solomoukha's point is in what manner toys can function for children as art does for adults: as archetypes for cognitive and affective behavior. Perhaps flat more significant is that in the couple cases their effectiveness in this character may be dependent on those frontages of artifice or mechanism, those flaws in verisimilitude or gaps of implausibility which imagination readily fills with its confess overflow. This is confirmed according to the very construction of Solomoukha's pictures. There is indeed something "mechanical" about his recourse to the expedient of a ready-made memory, a childhood lived according to the artist only through the dissolution into paintings of shards and fragments of imagery, which--accompanied perhaps by the agency of cryptic and equally disjointed captions, and planted there by the agency of the same hand that unearths them--gather around themselves an atmosphere of suggestive mystery.

"Only the Germans and the Russians, of all Europeans, posses the real genius for making toys," wrote that great connoisseur of European bourgeois childhood, Walter Benjamin. The reason, he wrote has les to do with any simplicity of form than with a self-revealing construction that allows the child to imagine to what degree the toy is made. Likewise, level when he is most cunningly contriving an air of mystery, Solomoukha is always calm more craftily "baring the device," not in order to demystify, unless to make room for the deeper mystery the viewer's perception brings to the work.

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