“I’ve always wanted to create the perfect universe, a kind of ideal world where all the elements, which might seem disconnected to an outside observer, in their totality are interconnected parts of one very strictly structured system.”

— Valery Chtak

The epigraph for the project is a quote from a conversation between Valery Chtak and critic Sergey Guskov, published in AroundArt back in 2011. Over more than twenty years of artistic practice, Chtak has indeed managed to create a unique Universe—one with its own galaxies, stars, planets, and black holes. A universe that opens up multiple possibilities for its exploration, yet exists independently of the level of involvement and immersion of the observer or researcher. Chtak’s world is made up of recurring images, wandering characters, recurring motifs, and hidden allusions to various cultural or historical phenomena. One of the most accurate terms he used to define his work is “layering.”

The origin story of “layerism” dates back to Chtak’s first total installation, created in 2007 in the apartment gallery Cheremushki. At the time, Kirill Preobrazhensky gave the artist full use of one of his rooms with the condition that the first “domestic” layer of the space would be covered with another material, forming the “foundation” for the works that would completely transform the space. In Chtak’s art, “layerism” involves not only the layering of materials and textures, not just the merging and collision of words and images, but also the layering of meanings and their interpretations.

The story of Chtak’s independent creative work began with the acquisition of his name, a “nom de plume” invented and adopted during his youth in 2000, which later became his official surname. On his way to visit his friend, the artist Petr Bystrov, Valery saw the inscription “Olya Chelak, I love you” on a passing truck. The brevity, strangeness, and sonority of the surname inspired him to search for a similar striking pseudonym, and on the bus ride, Valery Uchanov transformed into Chtak. The word, with no specific etymology, reflected the artist’s creative credo—to create things that are intriguing, that prompt the search for answers, and that only make sense if one is willing to abandon logical interpretation. These are things in which one of the key roles is played by the text: “I want a combination of words, to turn a simple phrase into a self-reproducing mantra.”

Chtak’s texts, even those that seem to comment on an image, typically elude interpretation. This is not only due to his attachment to mixing languages—Russian, English, and French are often replaced with much less accessible languages such as Eastern Slavic ones, or even Udmurt or ancient Aramaic—but also primarily due to the absurdist dissonance between the written message and the image. At the same time, Chtak’s art is marked by a rare ability to make the word an inseparable part of the visual composition. His texts are distinguished not only by wit but also by an impeccable sense of proportions, character, scale, variability, and originality of font. Behind the seemingly spontaneous actions of the artist lies a genuine culture that paradoxically coexists with the deceptive nonchalance of gesture.

In one of the first major articles about Chtak, Ekaterina Degot wrote that he manages the “hypostatization” characteristic of Russian avant-garde—turning a word into an artistic object (as poet Alexander Vvedensky, a member of the OBERIU group, wrote: “the word, the tribe, grows heavier and turns into an object”).

Another feature of Valery Chtak’s art is his signature “gray” palette, which he only deviated from in rare instances. “In the universe of black and white, everything already exists—gray is always different and significant. Gray is blue, red, and green—it is any color, as long as it is gray,” the artist asserted.

The exhibition “This is Not Everything, But It’s a Lot” is a retrospective outlining the artist’s path from his early works of the 2000s to the 2020s, including pieces from the last months of his life. The exhibition demonstrates the wide range of Chtak’s “layers”—from the “portraits” of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose diverse and completely different appearances were captured in the 2003 canvases, to drawings that seem like studies for future large-scale compositions, fragments of installations in which significant roles are played by unfoldings of “dissected” corrugated cardboard, and objects that became surfaces for virtuoso and bold manipulations with words and images. The exhibition also features images of identical high-rise buildings that form the collective image of the “Cities of the Russian Federation,” as well as Chtak’s “impossible” C-Alphabet. At the forefront of the gallery of recurring characters is his alter ego, a figure with a cane and a top hat—Mr. Sthow.

The exhibition also references important historical figures vital for understanding the evolution of the artist, including Joseph Beuys, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Franz Kafka, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and others.

“This is Not Everything, But It’s Much” is the first attempt to recreate Chtak’s “layerism” without his involvement, following the rule established in one of his central works: “The narrative must be nonlinear.” As Chtak often repeated, following musician and artist Captain Beefheart: “You would never have succeeded if you knew how to do it.”

Irina Gorlova