ERIK BOULATOV

The artistic work of Erik Boulatov (1933) gained visibility and renown with the Soviet perestroika. In his paintings, often reflections of his distant and ironic standpoint, he combines writing with pictorial elements. The painting, Tam tam po dogoram – a tam i dom (2002, There, there down the road – and there is home), is part of a series of 12 paintings entitled Vot (Here), in which Boulatov associates the verses of a poem by Vsevolod Nekrasov with what he calls an essay on a pictorial liaison between the works of Russian realists from the 19th century and the constructivism of the 20th. Furthermore, the technique of pencil and dry pastel as well as the different uses of light confer to the paintings a dreamlike depth characteristic of the artist’s works.