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Artist Statement:
Atelier Alexander Sutulov is a
digital art studio
specializing in a wide range
of fine art productions. Its
mission is to offer and
exhibit to a general public a
unique approach towards a new
form of artistic expression.
In the past decade, Digital
Painting has been a
revolutionary concept of
bringing together all artistic
media into one coherent visual
language.
Considering the background of
visual artist Alexander
Sutulov where his training
encompasses a vast experience
in all form of media such as
drawing, painting, printmaking
and sculpture, his digital art
work constitutes a synthesis
of his entire previous
endeavour in addition to the
new challenges established by
digital media.
At close observation,
Alexander’s work can be
recognized in its richness of
surface and most important,
the achievement and mastery of
a technique where its attempt
in any other media would be
virtually impossible. The true
value of his work relies on
this fact where combined with
state of the arts printing
technology, the end result are
authentic works of art.
Long has been the discussion
over the “originality” of
second generation images (all
form of printmaking involving
two or more “transfer
substrates” in order to
achieve a final result, ...
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Artist Exhibitions:
SOLO EXHIBITIONS:
1998 ALEXANDER SUTULOV,
DIGITAL PAINTINGS / JULY 1998
Modern Art Museum, Santo
Domingo, Dominican Republic
1998 ALEXANDER SUTULOV,
DIGITAL PAINTINGS / JUNE 1998
Pedro Olmos Muñoz Cultural
Centre, University of Talca,
Talca, Chile.
1998 SOLO EXHIBITION BY
ALEXANDER SUTULOV / MARCH 1998
Pacific Cultural Foundation
Art Centre, Taipei, Taiwan.
1997 ...
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Artist Galleries:
Coming Soon!
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Collections:
UNIVERSITY CITY MODERN
ART MUSEUM
University City, Missouri,
USA
MODERN ART MUSEUM
Santo Domingo, Dominican
Republic
UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO
PRINT COLLECTION
Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
MODERN ART MUSEUM
Castro, Chiloé, Chile
UNIVERSITY OF CONCEPCION FINE
ARTS MUSEUM
(PINACOTECA CASA DEL
ARTE)
Concepción, Chile
MODERN ART MUSEUM
Valdivia, Chile...
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Commissions:
2005 HISTORY OF CHILEAN MINING
MURAL / FEBRUARY 2005
El Teniente Division, Codelco
Chile / University of
Concepción
2004 TIERRA DE LA FRONTERA /
MARCH 2004
Digitalis, Vancouver, Canadá.
2004 CHILE UNA VISIÓN DE
ULTRAMAR / JANUARY 2004
Chilean Navy.
2003 OMME VIVUM EX OVO /
NOVEMBER 2003
Picasso Mío, Madrid, Spain.
...
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Reviews for Alexander Sutulov:
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ELECTROGRAPHY
Aspects of a new imaginative reality
I.
From the dawn of humanity, mankind’s permanent question has been: How can I give physical form to my thoughts, so that others can see them? The earliest examples of this are the casting moulds used for the serial manufactures to make a series of ritual or domestic utensils in China, circa 8.000 B.C., in the towns on the delta of the Yellow River. These were followed by the Chaldean impressions which, being seals, reproduce unique images on clay.
Yet way before this, we find a desire to express aesthetic or emotional aspirations in the art of the Parietal Period and in the painting on the cavern walls of the Magdalenian Period in Europe, 36.000 years ago.
Many centuries have passed, yet there is still a permanent desire for new media with which to translate the idea of human spirit onto a substrate. This can be, in the case of graphics, cloth, papyrus, paper, a wall or any other material with a smooth and stable surface. We also find this in the technical history of easel painting and wall painting, as well as what we call engravings.
The history of the printed image has two basic periods. The first period comprise the development of all traditional printing techniques, such as woodcut, metal engraving and lithography, as well as mixed media techniques and variations on them. The second period of graphics deals with contemporary printing media, with silkscreen and offset as the first media to dominate the second half of the Twentieth Century. Yet, it is only during the sixties and beyond that the printing media associated with electronic technology give rise to the revolution of printed matter and visual communication. Electrography is the term coined to name this form of printing and visual communications. Electrography is a new form of algebra that establishes richer and more complex, pragmatic and multifaceted relations that allow its practitioners to escape traditional aesthetic and technical conceptions and criticism.
II.
Alexander Sutulov was born in South America, in the city of Concepción, Chile.
His childhood was nurtured by a formal education received in a university town as well as by the cultural and academic activity of his family. Thus, early on, his calling and spiritual horizons led him toward the field of visual sensitivity. His aptitudes, conditions and destiny demanded other experiences, other masters, adequate for the challenge of the times.
The United States were the symbolic basin where his aspirations decanted. The great plains near the Rocky Mountains were his home. First settled in Utah where he began his studies as a graphic artist and where he learned the technique of transforming the silhouette of ideas into works of art and then colouring them. He learned the path from line to colour, appreciating nuances, complicating them and yet retaining the original coherence.
Albuquerque was his second formative home. Here, his experience with traditional painting processes was combined with more contemporary techniques, including the Mylar method, photo transfer and mixed-media printing techniques. This residency represented an enormous leap forwards in terms of the new contemporary aesthetic and expression possibilities.
III.
Early on, the artist’s work centred on the morphology and history of life forms. His zoomorphic iconography studies included the formal appearance of living things, from microscopic protozoa’s, ichthyologic species, birds, higher and lower mammals, all the way to the human phenomenon.
During his investigation of living beings, he discovered biomorphic complexity and the history and the enslavement of life to unrelenting time. His work reflects these three elements very coherently.
If we observe his works, we find that the theme frequently arises from a cultural or historic reference. The motif appears as a ghostly allegory that transcends time and is dialectically related from the material plane to successively juxtaposed visions. The traditional perspective, which gives the illusion of depth in traditional art works, is replaced by another one having a time-related essence. The spectator sees the image in successive times, giving rise to the vital depth with which it shifts dynamically within the theme. We apparently see a veil that masks the entire work or fragments of the theme. It is the technological treatment, however, that makes possible this consistent phenomenon in which the seemingly inarticulate elements are reunited at will in the spectator’s retina, transforming the original idea into personal visions of an almost probabilistic nature. The vital aspect of Alexander Sutulov’s works does not spring from drawing in the sense of rendering, but from the dynamic interaction of the superimposed planes, none of which has a higher priority or hierarchy from the spectator’s point of view.
The alliance between the artists’s aesthetic and the exploration of technological capabilities afforded by state-of-the-art communication devices open up a surprising scenario for an aesthetic presentation of time. Through the formal device of superimposing memories –moulded into cultural archetypes- the artist manages to capture the dimension of time associated to the genesis and cyclical aspect of life.
In both their conception as well as in execution, the works of Alexander Sutulov represent a break with traditional models. The concept of the standalone studio, occupying a single physical space placement, disappears. The works are created in a floating studio (*) where the artist’s talent generates a diagram and directs the creative process, controlling the vectors of quality in order to obtain an aesthetic product that is technologically original, unique, regardless of any spatial location.
Thanks to this mode of artistic execution, formal references become unusually alive, as they originate from the human synthesis of sensitivity and are devoid of gestural overacting. It is life as usual that flow through these works, life that bears the substance of a complex, partially visible past seen through the windows of today.
IV.
Alexander Sutulov was born in Concepción, a university town where his father is remembered as an emblematic figure and who’s “Pinacoteca de la Casa del Arte” fine art museum at the University of Concepción, owns major works by the artist. It was here that he discovered, in his youth, wall painting as a means to express ideas. In a way, ever since his works have been an attempt to configure the plastic scripture of the narration of humanity’s cultures and of life’s challenges. The past, everyday things and the ghost of what is to come, awake our consciences as we view his work.
Antonio Fernández Viches
Director of “Pinacoteca Casa del Arte” Fine Art Museum
University of Concepción
June 1996
(*) Term used to describe a workshop characterized by a notion of mobility, displacement of visual information, the use of photo transfer, displacement of digital files, etc.
ALEXANDER SUTULOV’S PROJECTS
1. An artistic Project is more than a set of writings, drawings and estimations to get an approximate idea of how much a work of art will cost, just as in an engineering or architecture project, for such is the dictionary definition of the word “project”. An Art project, which is what Alexander Sutulov presents us, are a particular form of thinking, they require a community to reach their true meaning, value, and existence. This artist’s proposition goes beyond any didactic pretence, establishing an aesthetic option –the good and the beautiful- aimed at something which is about to exist, and which needs every person’s nearness to have the opportunity to become his/her possession. The latter because an idea in art does not call for the sum of knowledge’s which make it possible, but it appeals to generosity: the joy of being beyond the boundaries that might be expected from professionals and private interests. More than different publics or clients, an art project needs actors.
2. In the 20th century projects are not a rare thing. We even have been living obsessed with them, and we do not conceive existence without this particular form of activity, which appears to be the only form of obtaining things, whether to reach the moon or to fix a house, or certainly the logistics needed to live a married life. In lieu of thinking of administering end-reaching plans, a work of art is a project which ultimately has the mission of getting lost and live by it. It doesn’t end as it was expected. This is the main difference between a project and an art project.
3. From centuries back we have projects that have remained and we have turned them into real works of art. How to elude the energy in the sketch of the façade of Strasbourg Cathedral (probably by Erwin de Steinbach, ca. 1280), which shows us how matter –stone– has been dominated by spirit –form. This drawing existed to establish the starting point of a very complex and long-lasting collective effort that would affect and determine the life and endeavours of a whole community. We can imagine the first day the city saw this drawing, and how it has been beheld by many people who reinterpreted it throughout years until these lines became stone. Probably at the end that cathedral was not as it was imagined in the beginning –a drawing. But in art projects this can be a benefit: the whole, finally, is bigger than the sum of its parts, and form becomes the sign of a whole civilization. It was the work of a number of persons who believed in it, which saw a deep meaning who up until today intrigues and moves us.
4. Another example of what an art project is can be found in a series of buildings which were only possible in drawings, for nobody thought they might be built: there was no technology available. But these sketches meant too much in those times, in spite of their uselessness. The fact that they were projects did not mean impairment; thus, they were prized and discussed. This particular form of the French to see and understand themselves was what we call today “visionary architecture,” which was born during the dark times of the French Revolution. Maybe it was a “necessary” architecture to exorcise that time’s bloodshed, whose main figures are Bouillée and Ledoux. It was a form of peace, no matter if it was the peace of cenotaphs and mausoleums. These works opened new ways and possibilities, both technical and artistic, to architecture, which only during the present century with such an overwhelming technology as the one existing nowadays, are possible to make. Post-modern architecture nurtures itself from these works, maybe to drive away the horror of a particularly violent century.
THE ARTISTIC PROJECT
5. Nowadays, a time of so much power, the artistic project, which is a potency –that’s why Sutulov works with digital technologies and classical crafts, which are the frontier of our present development– has difficulties to exist, maybe because of the atomization of languages and knowledge’s; each one wants to reduce the plan to its own enclosure without the possibility of a plasticity to go beyond the boundaries, in order to articulate itself with others: fragments prevent the whole, this is our contemporary crisis. Due to many of these problems, human capacity is unable to project itself, with the help of an all-powerful future, beyond its boundaries. Future has become a despotic exigency and it is no longer a possibility to turn the present into a rich and varied realm. Works of art only exist, on the other hand, as a chance that enlightens the present, and hence derives a great part of their richness and renewed immortality which can be seen in them in each and different human epoch: art, no matter how desolate be the reality it deals with, is a repose. What was the future when a cathedral was been built, if the completed work was going to be beheld by the next generation? Where was the efficiency of da Vinci’s projects
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