Prague is the most appropriate city for an artist like Victor Safonkin. On the one hand, it is the crossroad of all European roads. On the other hand, it stands somewhat apart from the rationalist Europe, for to the present day it has been feeding on the powerful mystic tradition: the sacral geometry of the centre, the shadows of the Rosicrucian fraternity, rabbi Loew and his golem, the epoch of Rudolph Il with its wizards, charlatans, great scientists like Johannes Kepler and certainly great artists - Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Hans von Aachen; not to mention the mystery of the Golem renaissance in Gustav Meyrink's novel and Kafka. The prime of visionary photography in the 20th century that had been following various versions of symbolism and surrealism for decades. In a word, the concentration of mysticism, absurdism and classic reminiscences in this city's culture is higher than anywhere else. How does it relate to what we call contemporary art?

Important is the great significance of what is tentatively being called the gothic line in contemporary culture (*). The word "gothic" is exceptionally substantial in contemporary cultural and political contexts. It alludes to the beginnings of the European culture - though, it also contains the reference to the Goths, the destroyers of ancient Greek and Roman cultures. The Gothicism, by contrast, brings in the topic of Renaissance that was interpreted in Romanticism as an alternative to Enlightenment. The gothic theme functions in fact as a constant polemic note in European culture; it was enriched by the aesthetics of J.R.R. Tolkien that overcame the limits of literature and visual art by the end of the 20th century to influence social behavior, morality, fashion and even political activism. To sum up: gothic practices are rooted in the criticism of early modern aesthetics with its rationalism and anthropocentrism, on the one hand, and in the criticism of the scientific world-view, on the other hand. Irrationality, phantasms, mysticism, trans-temporality (understood as free time travel), adoration of the Alien (whether J.R.R. Tolkien's Dragon, various cinematic aliens or the specimens of lost civilizations), non-humanistic system of values and hierarchies, the aesthetics of the horrible and eschatological - these are the categories to describe the phenomenon of the gothic in contemporary culture (paradoxically, this realm of the irrational, despite general conceptual crisis and failures of systematization, still favors the seeming y rational practices of deciphering and decoding - viz. various "da Vinci codes" and similar literary and film trash. Apparently, when operational systematization becomes an agent of esoteric practices, it loses all its original rationalism). (…) This powerful and rapidly developing cultural layer has had no pertinent reflections in contemporary art so far. Expansion of the gothic has been hampered by rationalism and self-irony. And there is yet another hampering moment that has stayed since the time of postmodernism, namely the fear of mega-narratives, the gothic as a whole being a set of "big stories." (…) To name the artists representing (whether consciously or not) the gothic theme, one should mention Hans Rudolf Giger, some artists of the Vienna school of fantastic realism (Ernst Fuchs, Rudolf Hausner, first of all), Klaus Jürgen-Fischer, Zdzislaw Beksinski, amidst others. It seems pertinent to interpret Victor Safonkin's art in the context of this gothic theme.

Surely, the first objection to our attempt to root the artist in this context will be dealing with the form Safonkin works with. What does it have to do with the gothic? The forms the artist employs are purely classical, for all the references to various versions of their expressive transformations, from mannerism to symbolism to surrealism. That is true. But the gothic in its contemporary interpretation lacks any definite form, the scope of its influence seems to cover everything, from the authentically gothic silhouette expressivity to any contemporary media effects. And the visual forms of Northern Renaissance, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, whom Safonkin has always been interested in ("The northern [imagination] has power, as it were, to revive its spirit even in our own times," wrote J.R.R. Tolkien) as well as Arcimboldo's mannerism and the symbolism of Arnold Boecklin and Fernand Khnopff do in fact meet these requirements. So, Prague, with its powerful visionary and mystic tradition and its concentrated atmosphere of the "gothic", is indeed the right place for an artist like Victor Safonkin. That is to say - for an artist who is, unlike mainstream contemporary artists, not ironic, who treats art form very seriously taking it for an equivalent of knowledge and a measure of craft and labour invested, who is a visionary trusting the ability of the image to translate certain essential messages - the master who operates tropes (allegories, symbols and images) and tries to redeem the initial keen meaning to the blotted out visual metaphors - irrational and at the same time pragmatic in their intention to trigger reactions and answer the questions of human existence that have long ago been acknowledged insoluble. In a word, the city and the artist have found each other. (…) Safonkin is very decisive as to the genesis of his imagery: rooted in the medieval iconography, it comes through the Northern Renaissance, Arcimboldo's mannerism and the 18th century's allegoric painting to the early symbolism and classical surrealism leading further to the contemporary fantastic realism. He puts layer after layer of modern experience and consciousness onto the imagery and existential phenomena of generations of artists who issue from the unconditional guru and patriarch of this realm - Hieronymus Bosch.

Victor Safonkin's biography can hardly add anything to his paintings. He belongs to the type often characterized as self-made man, though there is a better description of the type in Russian literature: in Ivan Turgenev's famous novel, Bazarov characterises himself as "self-broken." Born in 1967 in Saransk, the capital of Mordovia, Safonkin graduated from an engineering college and has never studied painting, even as a child. He considers 1990 as the first date in his artistic biography.

Safonkin is a winner of the International Salvador Dali Alliance prize. This makes one think that the artist has been firmly embedded into the existing stylistic hierarchy and is going to gradually strengthen his positions, finally becoming a "permanent value" of the rare movement that we agreed to call "gothic" and that, as we pointed out, distances itself from contemporary art. It would be apt to add that it was no coincidence that Czech republic which balances between Russia and Europe has readily accepted the artist whose disturbing images are so much reminiscent of the individual and social phobias from the films by the recognized maitre of direction and animation Jan Svankmajer.

Safonkin is an antagonistic philosopher and a fighter, as he puts it, with the "nightmare of demoralizing indifference." Prone to declare his positions blatantly, he nevertheless finds plastic forms for them - that is, remains, to his credit, faithful to artistic autonomy as a master of images. Safonkin's works are figurative and created by means of traditional academic painting (though inevitably refashioned by surrealist experience) - and yet, this perfectly agrees with contemporary anachronists and visionaries, fantasy artists and time travelers whom we tentatively gathered under the umbrella-term "gothic art": like them, he has his own "museum" at his disposal - a huge depositary of art forms and images. Apart from reanimating the persistent, stereotypical and sometimes even blotted-out mythologems, he builds up his own iconography which finds very skillful embodiment on his traditional oil-on-can-vas paintings. His memory of the scale of paintings characteristic to the epoch of transition from sacral to secular art and his conscious adherence to their standards results in the almost palimpsest-like multi-layered collection of images and extreme density of symbolic rows. Accordingly, the artist inevitably becomes a mediator and an intermediary, both in the communication with predecessors and interlocutors dear to him and in the communication with his contemporaries. Among those who talks with him in "the same language" the artist names Bosch, Bruegel, Max Beckmann, Ernst Fuchs, Hans Rudolf Giger, Zdzislaw Beksinski. …

Safonkin is working with tropes (all kinds of parables) very seriously. Apart from the traditional allegory (depiction of abstract ideas with particular artistic images), he uses what can be called an occasional allegory. This stands for private allegory which the author has discovered empirically and included in his personal iconography; it is akin not to metaphor, but rather to metabola which appeared in the poetics of the last third of the 20th century as an expressive means of meta-realism. "Meta-realism is the realism of many realities connected by continuity of metabolic metamorphoses. There is a reality open to the vision of an ant, and a reality open to the wanderings of an electron, and a reality compressed inside a mathematical formula, and a reality about which they say 'angels' flight on azure heights'. Metabolic image is the way these realities are interrelated, it is an assertion of their ongoing unification" (Mikhail Epshtein). Not merely a resemblance, but a mutual involvement of different worlds equal in their reality - this is what the artist's pathos seems to be. Be-sides, one should take trans-temporality into account: the artists freely travels not only across "realities", but also in time.

Meticulous analysis of the elements of Victor Safonkin's visual universe and reflection upon their evolution are captivating. This invitation for deciphering and decoding is a trace of the trend in the modern culture that we have defined as gothic. But this deciphering is endless: solutions entail new puzzles; otherwise irrationality, mysticism and spiritual hierarchy that define this culture would have been impossible. Besides, indulging in deciphering may lead us away from the integrity of the pictures, the comprehensiveness of the artist's poetics, the unsolvable that forms the ground of his imagery.

To return to the proper view and scale, let us recall another comprehensive picture of the "immortal sin ubiquitously lurching" amongst the "iron race":

The torturer's delight, the martyr's sobs,

The feasts where blood perfumes the giddy rout:

Power sapping its own tyrants: servile mobs

In amorous obeisance to the knout:

Some similar religions to our own,

All climbing skywards: Sanctity who treasures,

As in his downy couch some dainty drone,

In horsehair, nails, and whips, his dearest pleasures.

Prating Humanity, with genius raving,

As mad today as ever from the first,

Cries in fierce agony, its Maker braving,

"O God, my Lord and likeness, be thou cursed!"

But those less dull, the lovers of Dementia,

Fleeing the herd which fate has safe impounded,

In opium seek for limitless adventure.

- That's all the record of the globe we rounded."

(Charles Baudelaire. The Voyage. Translated by Roy Campbell)

excerpts from the essay “The Safonkin Code” by Alexander Borovsky and Anton Uspensky, included in Victor Safonkin, published by the Ludwig Museum in The Russian Museum, The State Russian Museum, Palace Editions, St. Petersburg, 2011

(*) see Khapaeva Dina. Gothic Society: The Morphology of Nightmare. Moscow: NLO, 2008