Litvinovsky

Litvinovsky is not a naive painter. He has read all the books! But he has an eye dumbfounded by wonder. Just like Paul Klee - to whom our artist owes nothing he discovers the living sources of creative instinct. An artist both delicate and barbarian, learned and childish, he strangles modern formalism, just as the new abstract academism. He refuses to conform to any injunction and follows his own impulses exclusively.

The first artistic education of Litvinovsky was that of a “fauve”, then of a post-cubist painter. But his lithographs, which are recent works, do not bear the seal of Matisse, nor the traces of George Braque. His volumes have not been dissected. In full possession of his plastics means, Litvinovsky has forsaken the exercises in visual synthesis that date back to the first decade of the century. All his images transcribe ideas through signs that delineate their object. They are the vocabulary of a hieroglyphic art. They stand out on a pattern of dark strokes, sometimes emphasized by pigmentary tones. They are rendered with a touch of humour, even sarcasm. And in some cases these signs have the magic characteristics of Egyptian and Etruscan paintings.

A work of art, according to Litvinovsky, is by no means a problem put forward and which can be solved. It is a play of hands and intellect, that slides through the mesh of commentary. However, this play is neither a feat, nor a mandarin’s of decorator’s entertainment. If the colour gives exaltation to a flat surface, it expresses, on the other hand, a state of feeling. The line transcends its initial function, becomes alive, acquires symbolic virtues. But the metaphors created by Litvinovsky are not riddles. They can be read as easily as the poems of Stephane Mallarme or those of St. John Perse. Their plastics content and substance are as rich as the verbal matter employed by these lords of language, whose vocabulary is studded with rare epithets. In the album of prints now presented to you, the pattern of lines is partly rectangular and rectilinear and partly based on waves and undulations.

Litvinovsky calls into existence a bizarre human fauna. His figures face the spectator like puppets, with invisible strings pulled by a mysterious hand. But these puppets do not have gestures and attitudes of automation. Their action is fed from the fountainheads of the soul. Their theatre discloses a human comedy, with phases and episodes that follow each other in rapid rhythm. The inventive genius of Litvinovsky, this capricious creator, gives birth to works that come close to “art brut”, the graffiti to be seen on the walls of quarries and caverns of Baux, in lower Provence (France). These works have their roots deep in the night of centuries. Their form remains primitive. It reveals the presence of a timeless art, last trace of an abolished past, or wide-open vista on tuneful morrows.

Litvinovsky, who is a seer, simply walks into the fairy domain of the imagination, justly called by Baudelaire Queen of Talents. This forbidden domain cannot be entered by lovers of prose, of logic and calculation. Only the poets can pass its threshold, these mysterious salesmen of marvels. Litvinovsky reacts against pedestrian mediocrity of daily life and its enslavement. The warp and the woof of his pattern of lines is a web of Archne. His palette of colours ‘valeurs’ is composed of ultramarine blue, turquoise blue, jade green, Veronese green, amethyst violet, red tones resembling coral islands, yellow tones like blond sea-shells. This artist reconciles total antagonisms: happy science and the kind of holy ignorance Gauguin mentions in one of his letters.

Litvinovsky, artist and creator of parables, is a star of first-rate brightness. His Empire is the Orient of the mind and the spirit - the chosen kingdom of the lovers of dreams.