Lot 10: One More Glance at the Black Sea, 1986

One More Glance at the Black Sea, 1986
Oil on canvas. 99.2 x 268.3 cm. (39 x 105 5/8 in).  Signed and dated ‘S F ‘86 [in Cyrillic]’ upper right and signed, titled and dated ‘S.FAIBISOVICH ONE MORE GLANCE AT THE BLACK SEA 1986 [in Cyrillic]’ on the reverse.

 New York, Phyllis Kind Gallery, 1989

 Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York

One More Glance at the Black Sea with all of its unbelievable persuasiveness, its bewitching shining, leaves the feeling of a secret. "Given a certain mysteriousness and absurdity – this is the highest stage of realism – I depicted what I actually saw. If you don't explain what is going on, then what you have is a riddle, a kind of enigma. But on a subconscious level, everything is calculated correctly, and the associations arise for the viewer: everyone is lying on the beach, having shut their eyes, covering up with a cap or a towel from the sun. This is what the project was built on: I simply sought that in-between layer which exists between the eye and the world you are looking at."
The painting emerged in the process of working on the project ‘Obviousness' – the artist's investigations of the optics of his own sight. The task became to reproduce the physiological reaction experiment like the one done in the beginning of the century by the avant¬gardist Mikhail Matiushin widening sight. Faibisovich investigated the phenomenon of double vision: "If you close one eye, then you see what is on the left, if you close the other, you see what is on the right – but I learned how to see and not to see simultaneously, with both eyes at once. As a result, my vision came to be unlike that of other people's – I understood this later. This duality of vision, when you look from one side and then the other simultaneously, is present in the painting: there are two noses and two caps, and in the background there is the actual world, figures."
Naturally, observations of one's own visual perception precluded the use of a camera – the artist worked with sketches, drafts. And then the entirely realistic background was constructed later – already with the help of a camera and photographs from his own archive. Material was selected to suit the finished composition of the painting; the broken arm of a girl in the foreground was the result of the superimposition of printed photographs, yet another confirmation of our inevitable ‘visual shortcoming.' For the artist it was "important to show simultaneously what we are looking at and how we look, both the material world that we are looking at and the apparatus that we use to do so."
Faina Balakhovskaya