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Library Information & Colophon

Biography

Oleg Dergatchov

(1961–)
Russian

Oleg Dergatchov continues the long tradition of the arist's book in Russia and the Ukraine. Like the Futurist painters who challenged the convention of illustration by redefining the relationship between image and text, Dergatchov creates books with a visual unity in which the words and images are drawn by the same hand.1 In 1910 the Futurists revolted against the publications done in St. Petersburg in the nineteenth century. These poets and painters of the Russian avant-garde created works that simultaneously emphasized the aural and visual perceptions of the word and embraced the folk images of their culture, flat patterns of Eastern cultures, and the Russian icon. Although their work was brought to an abrupt end by communist rule, it was not forgotten. More than fifty years later, the formal components of design espoused by the Futurists-such as asymmetry, shift, interpenetration of word and image, bold imagery, and hand-scrawled text-are used by Dergatchov in his numerous books.2

Dergatchov studied technical printmaking at the Ukrainian Print Academy in Lvov in the early 1980s.3During this time, the height of the Cold War, there was an atmosphere of stagnation and repression.4Under the censorship of this era, art was only allowed to address ethical questions and not ideological ones; thus Dergatchov's art was personal expression, occupied with private and particular experiences. As a student Dergatchov found in the brutal writing of Franz Kafka and the surrealist and absurd poetry of Daniil Kharrns literature that corresponded to his personal sense of the world. These literary influences appear in Dergatchov's prints of surreal fractured images and spaces.

In 1989, after the opening up of the former Soviet Union, Dergatchov established Do Press, a small printing press at his home in Lvov, where he has published over twenty limited addition artists' books. Some of these elegant works contain his own poetry, and others use classical literary texts including the work of Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Daniil Kharrns, and Alexander Vvedensky. Dergatchov does not merely illustrate the text but rather provides his own commentary on it. For instance, in the book Anna Akhmatova the etched images of surreal landscapes precede the text, so that one reads the signs and symbols before the poem. Upon opening the pressed cardboard cover and turning the embossed cover sheet, one is met with a stark black etching of a square fence around a circular hole cut into the earth. Turning the page to the next etching, one finds the ground plane is fractured into a seemingly huge sky. In the third image, masses of the ground plane float in space with keys lying upon them. After these three images the poem is printed as follows:

I'll be forgotten? That's really
nothing
I have been forgotten a hundred
times,
A hundred times I have lain in my
coffin
I may be dead and buried even
now
My Muse I've known to loose both sight
and hearing
And in the earth to rot, a seed that's
doomed to die,
Only to rise again one day like
Phoenix
In all its glory against the azure sky!

21 February 1957
Leningrad5

The poem is followed by an etching that is evenly divided into the black of the ground and the white of the sky. Out of a rubble of organic and inorganic images on the bottom half of the print a bird's wings are seen emerging. It appears that Dergatchov has created several etchings in response to Anna Akhmatova's poem. Each of these four images gives the viewer another point of departure from which to understand the text. Although he never illustrates the images referred to in the text, his use of geometric forms and fractured spaces create the sensation of falling and rising that the poem so poignantly describes.

Each of the eight books in this exhibition has a unique sculptural form. Presented in silk sacks and cardboard boxes, covered in handmade paper or gauze bandages, each work uses material specific to its theme. The opening of these cases reveals the smell and texture of hand-pressed paper and the strings of hand-binding; there is an awareness that each page was stitched, each line was drawn, and each image was pressed. Fixating on the hypnotic visual intricacy of the etched images reveals both articulated figures and landscapes layered with geometric solids that symbolically refer to the text. Equally, the typography is as much a complex of geometric forms as a sequence of images. In this work, instead of laboriously assimilating lines of letters in sequence, the eye immediately grasps the semantic value of each frame through the contrasts of tone and forms within the page.

In Dergatchov's book Signs, bound in brown-stained gauze, the small square of text on the front page states, "the handmade book is a sign in the infinite space of symbols and concepts."6 This statement best describes how his entire body of work functions for the viewer. This work is filled with graphic signs that Dergatchov designed as a direct fusion of image and text. It is divided into three sections: white signs (symbols for contentment, selflessness, divine joy), neutral signs (symbols for equilibrium, repentance, gratitude), and black signs (symbols for darkness, misfortune, hopelessness, impotence, catastrophe). These signs, done in black, white, and gray washes directly into the book, use visual language to express emotional states of being.

In performing the act of viewing Dergatchov's books, one becomes intensely aware of the process of the objects' fabrication. Each piece is made with an astute attention to detail, not only to achieve a beautifully crafted object, but also to present each material's expressive qualities.

Artist statement

The drawing process is the way I have known and used since my early childhood to attain freedom and to get a state of bliss.

A drawer—(it is a beautiful word) is simultaneously a master of line, a magician, and a poet. He is a thinker, a philosopher, and a creator. If you find the word unknowable then make yourself at least delighted with the beauty of its lines, with their strange perfection and the infinite number of their appearances.

Indeed we all live in our games, in our worlds that we ourselves create. When coming back to drawing, we are really happy! Our lives are like a piece of an infinite line that comes from the void to travel everywhere.

My line is my way of traveling. It is created on a paper and extended during my wanderings and journeys through the image. It is not possible to measure the lines of life or make them knowable. The magic of drawing is embraced in the everlasting fascination with the mysterious and the unknown.

Drawing is for me a substance of the soul and its pattern, it reflects your lot, as do the lines of your hand or the verse of foretelling writing.

– Oleg Dergatchov

– This text excerpted from the Samizdat exhibition at the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery in Portland, Oregon, from February 6-March 16, 1997.

Footnotes

1Ljiljana Grubišič, "Tradition and Innovation in the Works of Leonid Tishkov," in Leonid Tishkov Creatures (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 25.

2John E. Bowlt, "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste: The Art of the Book and the Russian Avant-Garde," in Samizdat: Russian Art (New York: Willis Locker & Owens Publishing, 1986), 35.

3Oleg Dergatchov, The Book Garden: Contemporary Russian Artists Books, exhibition catalog (Manchester: John Rylands University Library, 1995), 25.

4Ludmila Lunina, "The Mythology of Leonid Tishkov: Sources, Heroes, Actions, Traditions," in Tishkov (1993), 12.

5Oleg Dergatchov, Anna Akhmatova: Poems (Lvov: Do Press, 1994).

6Oleg Dergatchov, Signs (Lvov: Do Press, 1995).

References and Links

Oleg Dergatchov official website

Oleg Dergatchov, 2005 (27 July 2010)

Ukraine Catoonist Oleg Dergatchov, 2002-2012, Lm Cartoon Museum, (27 July 2010)

Exhibitions