My friend in France, he's a painter. He's 30 years old.
I was asking him other day
'Who is your favourite living painter?'
And he said, 'Erik Bulatov!''
Water, water, water, water, water,
water, water, water flowed.
I was trying to express
a mass of water that is moving.
To figure it out,
I needed this number of pictures.
If I was more talented,
I would have figured it out quicker.
I think it was maybe 20 years ago.
Erik, he was so kind to show his work
and as we live close to each other, we often meet.
Sometimes he asks, 'What's wrong?'
Or 'What do you think?'
And when he comes to my studio, he also comments
and he tells me why it has to change here.
'Maybe this way is good'
And even for a young generation, it is surprising how radical his ideas can be.
It was 1963,
when I realised for the first time
what I have in my hands is a painting
and that's the only tangible reality I have.
From that moment,
I realised I was a painter.
In Soviet times,
all means of making money
were in the hands of the state.
But I didn't want to depend on state commissions.
And together with Oleg Vasiliev,
a painter and my closest friend,
together we earned money
by illustrating children's books.
The first time I saw his work,
I was a student in art school.
It was so interesting what happened in Russia.
The big artists and what they do
and the reactions.
It surprised me.
It has different dimensions, different layers.
It has a perspective and you have a position in this perspective.
Shortly after the death of Stalin,
new opportunities were opening up.
American Pop Art played an important role for me.
For me it was very important
to express the spirit of our times
and speak my own language openly.
In that respect Pop Art was my ally.
And then it occured to me
that it absolutely didn't suit me.
Because in Pop Art
that replicated world is really the only reality.
But what was important for me,
the world of social interactions, has limits and my task was to
penetrate the boundaries of this world.
To go beyond.
I know that he is not a Pop Artist,
but at the same time his language is very accessible to everybody.
Because for Erik it's very interesting why the younger generations
are really inspired or interested in his work.
He's very proud of these things.
The subjects about which he's speaking,
have also the same importance for the new generation of this time.
This is a book that I bought in the Pompidou Centre where he had an exhibition,
and this is the image that I photocopied and I had on my wall.
Then I tried to use typographies
with perspectives in my movies.
And when you use credits or you put title cards,
you go for images using beautiful typographies.
When I came to discover his work,
I had all these references on my wall.
I have bootlegs of my movies
from Russia of all the movies.
So I can make copies. I can give him
the Russian versions of my movies if he wants.
They are very graphic.
He's a symbol of the moment of converting from communism to capitalism.
With his work like Freedom
or Perestroika,
where now many
young generations of artists or designers,
they try to find influence.
And then I have this factory.
I think it's a really great space to bring Erik here and to think
if it's possible to test all his paintings
that he did before in three dimensions?
I felt a great desire
to express through The Foundry
and through this image, the tension of today's situation.
In Russia we have this sentence
'Forward in the circle'
It looks like you're turning around,
but everytime you stay in the same place.
For a while now
I've been working on a painting
that one can enter.
In which the viewer can find themselves
inside the space of the painting.
As I believe the construction still remains a painting.
Can a flat surface hold on to the space?
And as it happened, yes it can.