Magomed Kazhlaev began creating what are conventionally called abstract paintings over fifty years ago, in 1970 Over time, his work has undergone repeated transformations: “landscapes” gave way to untitled compositions, bright expressive splashes of contrasting colors yielded to the solo performance of gray, delicate glazes — to dense, smooth surfaces, and monochromes—to lines or the signature “K.M.” that disrupt the serene harmony of color, as if placing a final mark on a canvas free of any imagery. In a text dedicated to the artist, Leonid Bazhanov asserted that “his painting is shaped by both the cosmos of ornament and the suggestion of field painting, the emphasis on painterly texture, the introduction of everyday context, artificialized expression, and an engagement with narrative.” This characterization offers a concise yet comprehensive description of the master’s oeuvre, positioning him as one of the most remarkable and elusive figures in art — one who resides somewhere between “intuitive” abstraction (as Anna Tolstova defined it in her article “Painting Without Rules”) and an unfiltered, direct response to both tradition and contemporaneity.

A Dagestani artist deeply rooted in national culture, Kazhlaev coexists with a painter par excellence for whom paint is the sole material for creating a world that knows neither borders nor traditions. The harmony of a uniform green is disrupted by the presence of a “red corner” left “by mistake,” the “caressing” of the canvas with light brushstrokes — by childlike squares in which one can discern a futile attempt to close the outline of a shape. Some works are literally built from numerous layers of paint-laden paper, resembling compressed cultural strata from different eras accumulated in the same archaeological site. A canvas saturated with painterly mass may suddenly be invaded by a line that “cuts through” the surface or allow itself to be covered by a network of ornaments composed of repeating — yet not identical — uneven ellipses, arcs, and squares. The handcrafted quality, the refusal to arrange elements into neat patterns, reveals the hand of a master far removed from the habit of weaving orderly decorative designs. And these are not ornaments at all, judging by the artist’s titles: “Starry Sky,” “Forgotten Address,” “Letter of a Nonbeliever,” “Ariadne’s Thread.”

Reflecting on Kazhlaev’s art, curator Vitaly Patsyukov wrote: “In their details and intricacies, in their spatial vector, Magomed Kazhlaev’s compositions manifest a creative unity with the alphabet of high symbolic artistic systems, echoing François Lyotard’s phrase: ‘What we see is not the end of modernism but modernism in a state of becoming, and this state is perpetual.’” Kazhlaev’s works recall the primitivist experiments of Mikhail Larionov, David Burliuk, Olga Rozanova, and Alexei Kruchenykh. This resemblance is particularly pronounced in compositions featuring texts — strange, absurd, enigmatic — where the artist seems to mix languages, “uttering” unfamiliar, unrecognizable words. Abrupt, short imperative phrases alternate with “inventories” of set expressions: Armenian cognac, Dagestani tightrope walkers, Vologda lace, and so on. Or seemingly out-of-place statements: “Pleased with the treat,” “He loved matzoni, eats and pasta.” Words clash with painting, yet at the same time, they become not just an absurdist device that disrupts the freedom of “pure art” but also a compositional building block.

It is in this collision of chaos and resolution, organicity and expression, beauty and the rejection of prettiness, timelessness and the acute experience of “changing eras,” chromatic richness and restrained palettes, severity and tenderness that the essence of Magomed Kazhlaev’s art lies. The exhibition “Inventory” does not aim to demonstrate the evolution of Kazhlaev’s work. Instead, it seeks to uncover, in the artist’s own words, “a plastically justified spatial logic” in pieces from different periods. Rejecting linear narration, the exhibition makes visible the “unity in diversity” of “painting without rules” — one that needs no justification from either universal or national traditions, even as it reveals a profound connection to them.

Curator: Irina Gorlova.