Artist talk with
Pavel Tokarev
'To imitate stress
To imitate tic
To imitate nerve
Ray
line
Stroke'
Acrylic on canvas
95x70cm
Tell us about yourself.
My name is Pavel Tokarev. I'm 31 years old ,working and living in Tel Aviv.
At the moment I work (painting ) at home, soon I will rent a studio, I promise to invite.
Where did your passion for art begin?
I started painting as a child, I was withdrawn and stuttered and drawing helped me to express myself without using words. As I got older stuttering passed and the usual routine replaced creativity for a while, study, work, etc.
I started painting again in Israel (I'm originally from Russia) at the age of 25 after reading a book by an excellent writer - Irving Stone "lust for life" the founder of a biographical novel, (I recommend for everyone to read). But of course this is only one part, one trigger that pushed to what is happening to me now.
How would you describe your work to someone?
My works includes poems (satirical) about painting, sometimes social and sometimes but less often political. The text in the paintings is mostly in Russian because I think and rhyme in my head in my native language. I also write in Hebrew and English, I add obscene words as they are like pure expression, like pure color without shades.
Since my poetry replaces communication with people, the line replaces the figurative, I try to combine or say better the word symbiosis, where one helps the other, but not always, so there is only one left, I will see what wins, words, satires or poster slogans, Maybe lines and stains will become a figure again (unlikely).
'To find bathers
Apples and mountain
To lose thoughts
Hope and reason'
Acrylic on canvas
95x110cm
'No parking
Private parking
There is a painting
There is no future'
Acrylic, spray on canvas
70x200cm
What are you currently working on?
Of the projects, only a series of works, but more often I came to a sudden enlightenment like "Eureka".
And I would also like to unite with someone and create a group of like-minded people like Dadaists, for example, or invent something new in painting, but it's more of a dream than a plan.
Can you highlight some of your influences and discuss how your influences have made an impact on you and your practice?
Inspiration varies, as do tastes and general moral and psychological state.
Once upon a time, Van Gogh was fucking good, now too, but you understand. It is probably easier to single out an entire direction than individual artists who influenced my art, this is: the "Moscow conceptualism" direction that grew up in the unofficial art of the USSR in the early 1970s, artists like Dmitry Prigov and Yuri Albert. .
The current "Tachism" in Western abstraction in Europe in the 1940s -1960s, represents a painting with stains that do not recreate images of reality but express the artist's unconscious activity. Strokes, lines and spots in tachism are applied to the canvas with quick movements of the hand without a pre-directed plan. Artists like Nicola de Style, Jean Pautrier ... And many others ...
I would like to pay tribute and thank you to my two teachers in painting (I studied at Shenkar) Larry Abramson and Gilad Efrat, they gave me two completely different directions and visions of how, why and what to paint in general.
Untitled
Oil on canvas
50x50cm
What are your plans for the remainder of this year?
I plan to continue painting.