The Chandelier of Damacles
Glyn Salton-Cox on the Life and Work of Alex Kosh

(Excerpt)

The theme of escape and of flight alluded to in the margins of Kosh's early 'monumental' art is fully developed in the work featured on the cover of this Naked Punch issue, 'Fear' (2003). The use of colour in this piece is typical of Kosh's considered mature style: subtly emotionally balanced so as to give circumspection to underlying passion. But what is perhaps most salient about this complex, searching statement is the way in which the drapery falls behind the figure as it flees. The use of flowing drapery to create a sense of emotional urgency is a mainstay of Soviet art: a bizarrely rococo stylistic tic which been used everywhere from fountains in Prague's old town to pedimential statuary in Vladivostok. As Kosh's figure flees, divided globe-like orb in hand, the tired stylistic mantle of its ideological 'duty' falls behind it in the form of a disguraded cloak. But the figure is not quite free. Onto the head of the figure clings a final piece of drapery, perhaps as a tribute to fearful memories that are impossible to forget.

If the emotional crassness and formal stagnancy of Soviet Realism has been described by David Caute as 'Tchaikovsky in the steel works', then perhaps it also creates a guilty Tchaikovskian dilemma for artistic honesty, as it requires the artist's true muse to be sublimated into another, more socially acceptable vehicle. Kosh himself illustrates this tendency with another, more potent allusion, to a novel by Vladimir Orlov, Danilov the Violinist. The protagonist is a semi-demonic viola player called Danilov, whose existence is torn between a develish desire of chaos and disruption of human enterprise, and a human/artistic impulse to create and construct - another instance of artistic 'double life'. At one particularly telling moment, Danilov is looking up at the ceiling of the rococo opera house in which he is playing, and his gaze comes to rest upon the chandelier. Suddenly he thinks of the plight of Damocles, conditionally revered and theoretically powerful, but yet catatonic with fear at the prospect of the huge sword hovering above him and his throne at all times. Danilov is suddenly seized with fear at the prospect of the chandelier falling down upon him like Damocles. The chandelier illuminates and dazzles, but is also dangerously and decadently bourgeois; its appropriation can only bring retribution to the Soviet artist, can only happen in the context of a fatal fall. And thus the hidden, personal Soviet artist's muse hovers, glittering, out of reach, dangerous and powerful. Kosh has catalogued his time under this chandelier of Damocles with unerring eye and angry brush; he has celebrated his freedom from this impasse with wit, circumspection and engagement. The future? Kosh responds with typically relaxed focus: 'each picture is, in itself, a new challenge,' as he rightly points out. And this is precisely why Kosh's work is so satisfying - whilst it encompasses eloquent comment on monumentous social events, his work loses no internal aesthetic interest and personal humanity, each work its own world of emotive forms. Critics with caveats beware.