How a kind surrealist revolutionized book publishing: the star of Russian illustration Kirill Chyolushkin

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Kirill Chyolushkin is familiar to many Russians from the book "Japanese Tales", published in the 1990s. Eerie and ironic images, the faces of the actors of the Kabuki theater and strange masks, animals, familiar and at the same time demonic, bubbling, restless, like seething stones and clouds … However, he, one of the most expensive artists in Russia, got into the sphere of book illustration almost by accident - and has long gone beyond it.

Cheolushkin is perhaps one of the most famous Russian illustrators. He was born in Moscow in 1968. Chyolushkin received an architectural education, graduated from Moscow Architectural Institute - Moscow Architectural Institute. Oddly enough, the famous illustrator names many modern architects among his inspirers - the father of hi-tech Peter Cook, Fry Otto with his bionic experiments and moldy membrane walls … MARCHI attracted him with a systematic approach to the study of culture and art - and the lack of ideological pressure … There was also student mutual support, and the opportunity to participate in exhibitions, and many options for "entering" the profession …

He began to study illustration while studying at the Moscow Architectural Institute, in the first years - for the sake of interest. When the first book of Japanese Fairy Tales came out, he did not have such a deep understanding of the culture of Japan and relied on traditional Chinese, not Japanese, art. The illustrations for the second edition, which appeared six years later, were much more elaborate - by that time the artist had plunged headlong into the study of the costume, weapons, and everyday life of the Japanese. "Japanese Tales" with illustrations by Chelushkin were nominated for the Biennial of Illustration Bratislava - the world's largest and most authoritative forum in the field of illustration. This work got to all significant exhibitions and forums, won a great many awards and brought Cheolushkin contracts with foreign publishing houses - which surprised the artist himself.

By the mid-2000s, Chyolushkin, he said, had "gone through all types of relationships" with publishers around the world - and felt that his work as an illustrator was beginning to drain him. He broke off relations with all the publishing houses with which he worked - peacefully and politely, but feeling that he was closing the door behind him. However, pretty soon he came to the idea of creating his own publishing house - this is how Chelushkin Handcraft Books appeared. Cheolushkin saw that domestic book publishing was at an impasse - and the organization of his own enterprise became for him a rebellion against the current situation, and a daring experiment, and entertainment. The publisher declares that modern printing technologies make it possible to produce a product of outstanding quality - and one cannot but take advantage of this. The publishing house's products really turned out to be of high quality and aesthetic, although not all projects were implemented. Chelushkin dreams of releasing a series of horror literature - and he has a dozen more ideas in stock.

Chelushkin, in addition to illustration, worked with Harry Bardin on the creation of the cartoon "The Ugly Duckling" as a production designer, and also found his place in the field of contemporary art.

In 2004, in Moscow, he presented scandalous paintings depicting explicit scenes and architectural structures - this is how the artist expressed his attitude to the emergence of censorship in Russia. He also created a series of seven large-scale graphic panels under the general title "Adaptation", where he explores the theme of symbolic interaction between the city and the person.

An important source of inspiration for an artist is cinema. Neorealists, directors of the "new wave", Andrei Tarkovsky, Vladimir Kobrin, Alexei German … Chelushkin himself dreams of making his own movie, but today he has tried himself in the field of video art, mapping, creating foam sculptures with a video image projected onto them. Cheolushkin often says in his interviews that the language of painting has exhausted itself.

The inability to surpass the masters of the past is a good reason not to do something familiar, but to look for your own, fundamentally new path. To be a contemporary artist means to create something that has not yet become "classical art", something for which the viewer is not yet ready. Foam sculptures, animated by video art, were sold to galareys of foreign collectors. This is the fate of many of Cheolushkin's works - since the 1990s, he has been actively exhibiting abroad, in Asia and Europe, is familiar with all famous French gallery owners, and has won success with the American public.

He also worked with American publishing houses, creating illustrations for famous works of the classics of American literature. In Russia, not so many books with his illustrations have been published - two collections of Japanese fairy tales and two books by Tolkien (they had to wait twelve years for their release!). As an entrepreneur, Chelushkin published several more books. They are written and illustrated by him - and tell about the phantasmagoric adventures of the girl Alice, significantly different from Carroll's, but immersed in the same crazy, illogical atmosphere.

Since his student years, the artist has been attracted by new technologies, he closely follows the development of the field of virtual reality design and dreams of creating a liquid screen. However, in his own work he uses quite conservative methods - in his words, "as simple as mooing, the language of drawing." Canvas, paints, knives and sandpaper to create expressive texture are the main tools of the illustrator, no computer graphics, color dots and a stylus instead of a brush. The canvas becomes the basis for the upcoming work because paper and cardboard cannot withstand the artist's experiments. The combination of complex textures and masterly possession of the line, the sharp character of the characters, the combination of the image, the disproportion on the verge of the grotesque, the layering of images, unexpected details, surrealism and a complex, erased color - all this is Chelushkin the illustrator.

Text: Sofia Egorova.