Near every painting, we see a scrap of paper, each scrap containing the very same inscrutable text. The gaps between the last two paintings are filled with a bright red cloth. The plates cast shadows, which grow shorter from one painting to the next. At an angle to the photo, a ceramic plate is glued to each canvas. At the top left of each picture, a glass pane encloses a photograph of the artist. We have a similar response to the next series of canvases: eight more gray oil paintings, in which the pigments are applied almost like a relief upon the surface. We would like to know more about these works, about their background and genesis, so that we may come closer to them for we already sense that there is more to them than they immediately reveal. What do they mean, these six adjacently hung paintings (all works, 1989), which are rendered in a near-uniform gray, with a single vertical line in the left half of each canvas? Why are those tiny wads of scrunched-up paper squeezed in between the individual pieces near the top? And why is the wad missing between the last two pictures? This series of paintings has a cold, almost sterile quality, yet it arouses our curiosity.
Upon seeing these works by the Russian artist Vadim Zakharov, the viewer’s initial response may be bewilderment.
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