Nikolay Cherednichenko’s new painting series, presented at CUBE from 3 to 29 September 2021, explored the mystical phenomenon of duende. Duende is a distinctly Spanish creative force, the spirit that possessed Lorca and Picasso as they made their finest works. It is passion and creation, an intimation of death and the breaking of familiar forms to assemble new ones. Neither a Greek muse offering harmony and inspiration nor simply a Dionysian impulse, it is a chthonic force that draws us into a flamenco rhythm and a game with death akin to bullfighting. In Federico García Lorca’s words, duende is power rather than labour, struggle rather than thought.
Cherednichenko renders duende as a nervous pulse and the tension of ceaseless becoming. By abandoning a spatial system of coordinates, his paintings take the visual language of the series into a metaphysical register. His non-figurative work turns the viewer toward the universal. The rhizome becomes both a symbol and an expression of duende: organic and without a centre, neither a unity nor a multiplicity, it resists a single organising code. As Lorca said, duende is incapable of one thing: repetition. So, despite their shared traits, the paintings form no common code, either in the way they unfold in space or in the ways they can be read.
The pulse of intense colour and broken forms gives the eye no place to rest. Do we see lines over a ground, or fragments of a shattered whole revealing another surface beneath? Before us, the flat canvas takes on the illusion of space, recalling the Op Art of Victor Vasarely. A centrifugal movement disrupts the strict rectangular edges of the canvases; to a third dimension is added a fourth, time, as the painting continues to unfold in its surroundings and in the viewer’s perception.
At first the duende series appears to be eight rectangular canvases of abstract painting. It becomes something more: non-representational art beyond fixed structure and, in Bataille’s sense, an operation of the formless that dissolves the opposition between form and content. Duende is energy, process and the becoming of paint, never a settled form or a repeatable principle.
Exhibition textduende, 2021 ↗