Alexei Malykh is a man from a long-forgotten country, where painting still thrives, and stories are told and believed... The Lord knows his country's credo. Where cats fly, "willy-nilly hunters" roam the forests, churches breathe like people, and people... People... Malykh's people is a story in itself. We'll return to it later.

Alexei Malykh is a modern vagabond. He was born in Berlin, studied painting in Moscow and lives with his wife and daughter in Kiev. He travels around Europe painting. In the Swiss Alps people would inquisitively approach him while sketching and say: "You're Russian? Painting the Alps?"

Alexei Malykh never knows what he is going to draw, or rather paint. "Whatever the Lord implants in the soul", - as people used to say in old Rus. Southern Ferapontov, Montmartre, the life of a raven or simply "all-pervasive movement".

"I paint like a bird flies without theories or explanations", - Picasso, Klee, Miro and Tangy used to say - idols of Moscow's artistic youth of the 70s. In the closed totalitarian atmosphere, creative freedom was inhaled like a breath of fresh air through a cell grill. Unemployment - the religion of a generation of "keepers and porters" is how B.G. - Boris Grebenshykov, one of the leaders of Soviet rock culture described the times and people.

"I draw until I feel my "way" through. Then at once I start to run", - more than anything Malykh is afraid of becoming "a famous artist", an image-maker knowing what is required and in what style. He's afraid of becoming a "private-lecturer" - a trend-setter in Russian culture.

He had his own mentors - the legendary, never sobre figure of Zverev was still around when he was a youth, walking the streets of Moscow, ready to paint a broomstick in a yard just for a bet; his old friend and head of Moscow's school of neo-expressionism, Victor Kazarin, taught Malykh how to paint and breath without restraint. The boiling pot of Maly Gruzynsky, the fist venue for Moscow's unofficial exhibitions, produced this maximalist, invested with unlimited sincerity and freedom towards everything from the very last brush stroke to his own personal life. Youths of this generation didn't dream of becoming "rich and famous", but of discovering and experiencing "something very important", something... That they themselves could not quite bring themselves to express. Some of them sank into the permanent tragedy of "society's personality", overburdened by the totalitarian status quo, spanning from socialist art to Kabakovsky's conceptualism. Malykh however was from a completely different world - an amazing being.

"Like a raven, like a cat - he observes the world not through the adult eyes of modern man, but of some other kind of being", - is what one young female artist said about him.

Malykh left Moscow, just as people left Arle in the 19th century. He dropped out of the unifying rhythm of Moscow and learnt how to listen and see what was around him. It was as if he'd got off a train in the middle of the steppes. Night. Silence. The solitariness of the place seems terrible at first. But then you begin to see the stars overhead, hear the real chirping of crickets, feel someone's shadow glimmering beyond. You begin to sense there's life here too.

The pull towards sincerity and authenticity brought Malykh to a strange, half wild type of painting - a kind of shamanism. It was as if he'd forgotten, what he'd been taught: perspective, expansive planes, composition. What kind of composition was bird-song in the wind? The wind blowing through the endless expanse of the steppes and weight of ages. Space in his new paintings was crushed, screwed up. A centuries-old blast of air. Neolithic pictograms appeared on the modern surface of his paintings. Pictures sprang to life on darkened icon boards. An old wooden spinning wheel found in the attic of a cottage, when spun plays before your eyes a whole pastoral of scenes from long ago. It's as if Malykh is sitting in his tower, where he directs his telescope in turn at an animal, at a bird and at some church or other. Built into his telescope, meanwhile, is a children's kaleido­scope. Shake it and everything is like in a story. Mixed up focuses-verging on the fantastic. Malykh's painting is a theatrical back-cloth dividing us from the life of railway timetables. "Not for everybody, only for the deranged," -as in Hesse. Usually he paints his disturbing, magical back-cloth in several layers, with a flight into endless depths of time and space at one stage, and then a textural explosion over matter the next. His back-cloths are tapestries of stars and magical symbols. The kind you'd see at the puppet theatre to which our mothers used to take us.

Malykh has a special affinity with children, a secret connection - just as with animals and plants. At one time he used to work in a children's art school, where he believed he learn more than at the institute. There are canvases filled with childish drawings, like "Attraction", which he painted

in his beloved Carpathians. What's this? A mountain landscape, a snowy avalanche, an ancient fear and ecstasy before poetry, childish joy from the very sense of this poetry, a cry of "Ah!"? Do you remember Yves Tangy, Malykh's favourite artist: "Mum, dad's wounded!"? "Ah" - is flying snowflakes and feathers, the disturbing state of a painted mass of great white smears, hanging over the small, raised hands of a small figure, the tense back-bone of a deer and the fragile vulnerability of cottages below. All at once! Malykh is a polyphonic virtuoso. His works are filled with an expressionist cocktail of Picasso-Palmov-like "scratches": three-dimensional forms with graphic signs and symbols; a virtually pure natural vision; pictographic "messages" and poetry and subject without context. Just like Stockhausen dreamed about configurations unfolding simultaneously through many different points of axis.

There is an old Carpathian word - "mollfar" used to describe a special kind of magician. If you ever have the chance to see one, he is small, thickset with a homely beard and a typical bulbous, Russian nose: an apparently ordinary little man, but on the other hand - a wandering prince, looking at the world through

"rose-tinted" spectacles. I always wanted to know what was going on inside his head? And it's not as if he invents things, or tells stories. He just "scrutinizes" everything. Whenever he visits the Carpathians, the first thing he always does is paint a test-landscape. Like hitting a tuning-fork, he sets the scene with a mountainous forest, the dialectic of a merry fiddle, intoxicated with the idle soul of an old village song. For him these trips always mean a purification. A cleansing of his senses of sight and hearing.

The whole post-renaissance period of development of European culture was aimed at transformation and overpowering the world of birds, beasts and plants. Malykh wants to be a bird, beast or plant. He had an exhibition where hunters sat in cages, while amazing, wiry animals roamed around the hall. For Cezanne "nature was still inside us", for Malykh "we are inside nature". Anthropocentrism - is not a dirty word for him. The whole of our age has been drawn towards the poetic strength of the primitive, to what Apollinaire once called, "the unique purity of frightening emotions". While Gauguin looked at the savage world through the eyes of a civilized man, and Picasso entered right into it, Malykh moves out towards birds and beasts through the "collective unconscious".

There are artists hooked on one subject - think of Morandi's famous bottles. Malykh paints everything he comes across in his life of a vagabond. And how! Apparently it's not the subject that's important, but how it's rendered - through the structure of a new language. The structure of an "open" world, a forest exposed through the sounds of night, the genetic memory of magical rituals, the non-linear logic of the life of ancient icons and vital strength of plants.

Remember there used to be artists of this very kind in China - they used to be called people of "the wind and stream". A new kind of old Weltmusik?

What's more Malykh never brings a work to its ultimate conclusion. For him a form remains constantly in the making, so to speak, constantly developing. Imagine a city at night inhabited by the characters from his pictures. The sun will rise marking the dawn of this kind of life!

These blots, streams - are light, seemingly playful. Heyzing (Heizing) would have jumped for joy.

He doesn't at all try to make his work attractive or meaningful. He simply draws or paints. Because he likes to and was taught in Moscow how to "get high" doing this. "As long as it's fun and I get high, as long as I get a kick out of it, I'll keep on painting". "Fun", "get high", "a kick" - these cant expressions have still to find their deeply-analysed interpretation. Meanwhile we with Lyosha (Alexey) will drink some cold vodka with a crisp, gherkin hors d'oeuvre. I certainly know when I get a "kick" - at the sense of what a tiny fragment of the world I am, of this "fierce and wonderful world", as used to be written at the beginning of the century.

A shaman doesn't have to write on elephant skins, silver birch bark or cliff walls. Environmentalists the time has come to build a Temple. The artists are now here who can paint the voice of a bird.