TOKAREV COMPOSING

Mikhail Lazarev,
Art Critic, Editor-in-chief of “Iskusstvo” Magazine ( “Art”) 1991

Music was the dream of his early youth. He became an artist. Not a landscape painter, nor a portraitist. Tokarev raises above matters of genre. He is a Master in the original sense. His art is omnip otent, yet the theme that was born in his soul takes its time before developing into a canvas, maturing slowly and steadily. S uch large-scale paintings, which Tokarev himself regards as foundational, are being born one after the other in his studio which is his microcosm that he is reluctant to abandon. An FM radio is his rapport to the outer world, there is no TV. He prefers books to being confronted by the exterior chaotic bustle and is discerning of things that would catch his attention.

Detachment raised to the rank of principle has found an expression in his almost Balzakian, on-its-head daily routine. He normally works at night, when the phone is silent and city trams do not rumble under the studio windows. The windows, elevated over Moscow, open up into the vastness of the city centre, with the front view of the Church of St. Clement, the Pope. The artist has already painted over a hundred views out of his window, taken at different times of days and years, filled with various movements of weather and soul, with the affinity to those that defined the long-term relationships of Hokusai with Mount Fuji and Monet with the Rouen Cathedral. These landscapes remind of small format musical pieces.

Tokarev paints in a studio filled with sounds of music. His elemental and unfulfilled longing for musical expression has been compensated by creating a uniquely original and nearly infinite series, under the title of “Man-Orchestra”. Today these are several large foundational canvases, accompanied by some seventy smaller works, their size ranging from medium to miniature. Unified by a single composition principle, representing a bouquet-like structure built of constantly re-appearing human faces-masks, arms and legs, an assortment of musical instruments from bandoneon to saxophone, naked female figures, birds, etc., they are all indeed reminiscent of horticultural arrangements, each of which has been created in its unique harmony of rhythm and colour, tuned to illustrate and express a certain musical theme, thereby imprinted by the artist's creative effort. These paintings are extremely diverse in their purely artistic character. One is replete with exultation, while the other rustles gently; one is saturated with contrast and colour, the other is almost monochrome; some are figurative and some are direct. The artist's fantasy and passion know no restraint, and he relentlessly returns to the same script. Moon that has fallen to one's feet, a nocturnal beach, a city wrapped into the fog, blue night with the crescent, and many other auxiliary images and motives enter the variations of the same masks, birds, and instruments, amalgamated in floral arrangements that rest on pedestals of a vast variety of origins: vases, birds feet, easels. Particular items ostensibly carry no individual meanings, but together they form the symbolic score of a specific musical mood.