published in catalogue "Contemporary Russian Artists"
Exhibition in Contemporary Art Museum Luigi Pecci
Prato, Italia, 1990

EB: When George Kostakis, the art collector, saw my first pictures, "Horizon" and "Danger", he was quite bewildered. He said "What's that?". When I said that it was a picture he was terribly upset; "A picture? What extraordinary arrogance. And this? This is a picture too? Well, I'm sorry, but this is going too far." Then, ten years later, Kostakis' daughter turns up, and says that they would really like to buy "Horizon", and that it is their favourite picture.

AM: "Horizon" was painted in the days when everyone was greedy for titles, awards, prizes and distinctions. You represented this by painting a seemingly endles medal ribbon along a seemingly endless horizon. The complete absence of irony in the painting is startling. It has all the seriousness of the countless award ceremonies which used to be broadcast on Soviet television at the time.

EB: I have always wanted to reflect the nature of the space we live in. The whole city was draped in slogans and portraits. It was impossible to get away from them. Official Soviet art cunningly circumvented this reality. When an artist painted a town, he would never include a street where there were slogans or posters on a building, which proclaimed, "Glory to the Great Soviet People," "Glory to the CPSU," or in the name of "Work," "Glory to Soviet Women," none of them were there. They were hung up for everyone to look at, but did they ever appear in a Socialist Realist painting? Why?

AM: "Krasikov Street" is one of my favourite of your paintings. It depicts a street on the outskirts of an ordinary town. A few people are walking along it. On a huge billboard the giant figure of old Lenin himself is striding to meet them. I've passed this piece of visual propaganda a thousand times, but the figure on your painting has succeeded in catching my eye and forcing me to consider the ideological symbols which have grown into an unshakeably firm presence in our daily lives. Why do you use the same techniques in your painting as were used in the original posters of "visual propaganda?"

EB: The problem of language is central to my work. I am trying to find a language in art which does not contradict the language which we use in life. I am very interested in the border zone between the aesthetic and the functional. I try to use the language of Soviet reality, which is one of political cliches, used to expound ideology. In this official, impersonal idiom very personal things can be expressed. I concentrate on a thing itself, rather than on my relationship to it. And so, I free myself from it, and become a channel for life. I begin to understand its hidden meaning, casting aside the illusions which falsely represent the truth. For me, the most important thing in art is being able to see and understand the things I do not perceive in life. Essentially, pictures are my idea of freedom. They provide the space beyond the social world. I think that the worst thing that Soviet propaganda has done, forgetting the lies and non-sense, is to have persisted in brainwashing us into believing that the social world we inhabit daily is the only reality. There is nothing else. Whether you like it or not, you have to adapt yourself. This is the way it is. Possibly there is another structure, beyond the borders, which is hostile to us. For years they have inculcated to us the idea that there is no alternative, that the whole world is a prison, that there is no possibility of escape and that it has always been like that. Therefore ad became a necessity for me, as it offered a possible way out.

AM: Were you alone?

EB: No, of course there were always two friends, Oleg Vasiliev and Ilya Kabakov, who are very close to me.

AM: It was suggested by a French man that the colours you use are peculiarly Soviet. He said that your red is a Soviet red, and that in France the red is different.

EB: French red is noble and artistic, it has the sheen of nobility. It is an unfamiliar red to me. I feel at home with the Soviet red which I use. It is penetrating and quite unique. It is warm, and has none of the coldness of nobility. It is rather piercing, disregards everything else and is intrusive and cumbersome. It is washed out almost to the point of being orange. It was not easy to find this shade ... It has a long chain of associations, it is almost a world in itself, and it evokes numerous familiar objects and occasions. Now, as strange as this may sound, a new sensation of anxiety and restlessness invades me. I don't experience feelings of liberty or joy, like I did during the times of Khruschev, but of fear. Still now I don't understand why. It is exactly this feeling of restlessness and fear that I wanted to represent in the painting "Winter". This picture represents the dramatic essence of freedom. Anxiety. Something completely unknown and new awaits us.