The Evolution of Form: Kirill Protopopov's Artistic Journey Through Postmodernism

Contemporary art enthusiasts encounter an extensive list of terms characterizing the evolution of styles. Among them is the fashionable word "postmodernism." Analyzing this term, we understand that it's not a unified style but rather a complex of artistic directions united by a worldview.

Postmodernism is important in examining Kirill Protopopov's creative method precisely because it's based on combining different historical styles and the interpenetration of historical epochs and national schools. Artistic culture appears as a single timeless organism. Along with the use of modern technologies, free and justified "quotation" is of considerable importance for the artist. As is known, the style never claimed to create an unchanging canon. The only value for it has always been the breadth and boldness of the author's self-expression.

Another phenomenon of our time is romanticism, which exists organically within postmodernism. Fundamental to it is an orientation toward mythological perception and intellect. In this case, the work is viewed as a cultural text with multiple meanings. The author expects a dialogue with the viewer, as the image in his works doesn't carry a straightforward narrative.

The next component, very important for Kirill Protopopov, consists of elements from various cultures "working" to realize his artistic potential, where form is an expression of thought patterns and the author's emotional reactions. In this case, the sculptural surface is a synthesis of forms and techniques through which artistic concept and content are realized.

The geometric patterns, enclosed silhouettes, striving for overall elegance, and giving the plastic surface the quality of precious stones make the works close to the elegance of jewelry art. The sculptor often combines modern materials with archaic elements in the form of semi-precious stones and color accents. All this refers us to the Art Deco style in its modern interpretation.

Kirill Protopopov manages to create elevated, emotionally charged images within the aesthetics of the mentioned styles without changing their meaning. The artistic and aesthetic uniqueness of his works allows him not to adhere to specific stylistic directions on one hand, while on the other, it gives them semantic ambiguity and complexity of interpretation.

The human figure is Protopopov's primary object of creativity. Despite all significant changes and deformations, the sculptor's characters carry clearly formulated thought and imagery. It is precisely due to their timeless external interpretation that the author focuses on the inner thought embedded in the work. Such an approach to the figurative component is logical for his personal style.

For Protopopov's artistic development, family traditions played a crucial role – he is the son of sculptor Andrei Vasilievich Protopopov (1916-1961) – as did his education, first at the Moscow Secondary Art School, then at the Stroganov Academy, where studies at the design faculty helped the artist understand the world in space and volume.

Seeking to comprehend the essence of phenomena, he studied art history alongside design. Ancient cultures – Egypt, Babylon, India, China, South America, and Byzantium – left a special mark on his artistic consciousness. Initially, this inspired him to work in relief, where the sculptor first sought to combine ancient sculpture with modernity. The influence of painting explains his love for the color of various pigments, smalt, and stones.

The laws determining the essence of small plastics have a great influence on solving artistic problems. The psychology and generalization underlying it make the viewer examine it carefully to understand the essence of the image or pose questions. Thus, Protopopov, appealing to the viewer's intellect, generously reveals his energy through the fusion of material and spiritual.

Kirill Protopopov's creative worldview is built on several fundamental laws. On one hand, it's the interpenetration of the author's knowledge and intellect with his creative beginning. On the other – it's the found, verified balance between creative imagination and material, between sculptural mass, form, and space. Color and light perform the role of accent in form construction. It, in turn, becomes a combination of sensually perceived means and techniques. The sculptor himself says about this: "...when making sculpture, you always need to think about proportions. There is such a concept as optical weight. There must be balance. You need to rotate the composition around the center and look from above, below, from the side... After all, sculpture is round."

The figures in Protopopov's compositions don't have classically correct forms and silhouettes, their justified deformation unerringly works for greater expressiveness, allowing multiple interpretations through the prism of playful space, movement of meanings, and associative connection.

Since 1988, using mixed techniques and various materials: ceramics, wood, metal, and acrylic, the sculptor began developing the theme of the Old and New Testament in sculpture, first showing these works at the Mars Gallery in 1993, then at XAC Multicult Gallery in Frankfurt am Main and the Baden-Baden Land Museum in Karlsruhe. One of the first works is the three-figure composition Mary, Ruth, and Naomi (1989). The main attention in this composition of ceramic mass with relief additions and color accents is drawn to the silhouette. Already here, one can note the main stylistic features that will be inherent in Protopopov's works for many years: the combination of different materials (in this case, metal and ceramics), the embedding of geometrically drawn relief into the plastic surface.

In the same year, the work Journey of Saint Elijah to Heaven was created. Here too, the compositional arrangement of color accents is of great importance: the fiery ascension of the prophet Elijah is marked by the upward diagonal flight of six fairy-tale birds: "...suddenly they saw a chariot of fire with horses of fire. A whirlwind swirled Elijah, and he disappeared from Elisha's eyes and was carried to heaven." The importance of the event and the greatness of the prophets are highlighted by color, figure size, and the construction of the composition's perspective plan. There are no details here, but the author conveys the grandeur of the moment and the significance of the images as a whole with few means. In the same period, within the Prophets series, the sculpture Prophet Isaiah was created. Isaiah was called the king of prophets. His thoughts were distinguished by unprecedented strength and exceptional depth, and his style by rare beauty and power. A strong-willed, powerful, gifted personality – this is how Isaiah appears in his sermons. It is these features of the image that the author concentrates in the figure of the majestic prophet with outstretched wings. An important detail is the wings, made of wood and inlaid with polished copper inserts. This is undoubtedly a tendency toward revealing open form, when the author is guided by the desire to convey the interaction of different materials: plastic mass, ceramics with glass, wood, and metal. The characteristics of space, both surrounding the sculpture and contained within it, are very important.

In 1999, Kirill Protopopov created several graphic sheets dedicated to the theme of the Apocalypse. The Book of Revelation by John the Theologian is the most mysterious, frightening, and difficult to understand part of the New Testament, consisting of visions and prophecies. In the timeless Apocalypse, the present, past, and future appear simultaneously before the spiritual eye. Evidently, this is why some future events are described as past, and past events as present.

This approach is close to Protopopov's creative worldview, striving not for detailed decoding of the plot, but for conveying, on one hand, his own worldview, and on the other – the immutability of universal human values. Thus, the author doesn't narrate the sequence of events but reveals the essence of the eternal struggle between good and evil. Combining the preciousness of centuries-old artifacts, the heritage of ancient Russian art with the culture of modern civilization, Protopopov strives for the convincingness of the whole. He approaches the task of imagery systematically, developing perspectives, proportions, colors. The structure and expressiveness of drawing and lines are especially important here, as they give an idea of the work's internal tension. The pictorial surface is characterized by the unity of seemingly mutually exclusive means of expression – stroke, intersecting lines and ornaments, closed lines forming a spot within themselves, and the silhouettes of the figures themselves. The author, using the allegorical language of classics, turning to the symbolism of ancient cultures and primitive civilizations, creates his own mythology. Before the viewer appear works that are extraordinarily romantic, executed with the precision and elegance of jewelry craftsmanship, and very capacious in semantic imagery.

Protopopov is fascinated by the image of the angel as a messenger, a conductor of Divine Revelation to the human world. The sculptor's creative searches are based on the union of creative imagination, penetration into the world of ancient Egyptian, Assyrian-Babylonian works. Having reconsidered the heritage of antiquity according to his creative manner, Kirill Protopopov simultaneously solves several stylistic tasks. At this stage, the material of works, form, sizes, and surface treatment technology change. During this period, the sculptor mainly uses wood, whose texture itself sometimes helps find the figure's silhouette. However, it's not the image that dictates the construction of the work. Here the dominant role is played by form, which becomes a symbol: "...in art, I try to maximize the subordination of silhouette to some symbol, make it concentrated, more 'strong,'" comments the sculptor. "But at the same time, I attach great importance to color, which gives dynamics to the stylized form." It's worth noting also the general color principle in surface solution. The light tone of wood combines with the warm light tone of metal, serving the unity of volume.

Such subtle and complex surface treatment and execution technique is visible in the figures Peacemaking, Angel with Silver Wings, and Large Angel with Golden Wings from the Rhine Angels series, created in 2000-2002.

In addition to colored smalt inserts that enliven the surfaces of figures enclosed in a strict silhouette, the author achieves transparency, depth of color through multilayer paint application, multiple glazes (sometimes more than ten), maintaining the integrity of form and silhouette with such diversity of color and materials.

Practically every composition by the sculptor is distinguished by spatial complexity. The image acquires spatial transformations: conceived as round, needing circular viewing, the sculpture acquires a planar character from a frontal viewpoint. The surrounding space becomes a background for it, the figure is perceived as relief. At the same time, Protopopov deliberately makes the sides of the figure different in decoration and color, emphasizing its three-dimensionality. On one hand, the author makes the staticity of figures fundamental, but at the same time, resorting to the elegance of silhouette line, using a combination of various material and color components, puts emphasis on external and internal movement. The balance between statics and movement is priority.

The image is always interpreted as a symbol, and this also contains the confrontation of two components: meaning and perception. Elongated, seemingly incorporeal figures are abstract, their decorative surface, the shimmer of material texture, colored inserts, and finest finishing stop the gaze, calling to penetrate the essence of the plot with the help of one's own imagination.

Kirill Protopopov's creative potential is in constant improvement and development. In the last decade, the aesthetics of composition and figure surfaces have gradually changed, increasingly the author finds interest not in combining materials with different plastic qualities, but in various treatments of metal, resorts to different combinations of bronze. The sculpture material becomes a co-author in the process of creating the work. It's impossible to predict how organic it will be in relation to space, whether the choice of material will be justified in dialogue with form. "Metal – a world of heating and cooling, flowing and deformations – is a completely different story, where the final result needs to be anticipated in advance, then the smile of transformations will open," admits Protopopov. Bronze with its variety of metal shades combines with graphic design, and kinetic pendants and colored inserts carry the mystery of combining materials, volume with color, silhouette with graphics. Decisive importance is attached to finding universal form, its proportionality to surrounding space, the power of internal tension. To convey this tension works a variety of bronze – brass, often used by the sculptor. "Bronze is a fairly soft metal, and there is such a metal – also bronze, but with higher zinc content – brass. Yellow in color, harder. I started using brass in sculpture because, I think, it's more tense, more resonant," comments the sculptor.

Animals and people – the unchanging heroes of sculptural compositions – are a metaphor filled with the author's spiritual world.

Since the middle of the last decade, Kirill Protopopov has been working on various interpretations of the People theme, where the semantic component of the Old and New Testaments is used. The sizes of compositions have become less variable, they constitute a unified whole of series, but each has its own meaning. To achieve volumetric or graphic contrast of surface, mainly bronze (brass as its variant), toned and polished surfaces are used. Compositions acquire internal spatial movement, they still tensely interact with statics and rhythm of movement, silhouette and color. Thoroughness, almost jewelry-like precision of execution emphasizes not only the image but also the connection of freedom of external and internal spiritual movement, its tension.

Today, work on the People theme is one of the most important for the sculptor in understanding human existence in the surrounding world. What's important is not only humans and their nature but also the surrounding space of the world. The sculptor presents humans in all their complexity, ambiguity, and contradiction through the language of metaphors. "It's important for me to understand," he comments, "how humans interact and are connected with this world, what the meaning of this connection is. And how all this can be expressed through symbols, using form in space, using time and the experience of human civilization."

Kirill Protopopov managed from the early years of his creative path to understand and clearly define his style in art. He occupies a special place in the modern form of modernism. Each of his sculptures is filled with semantic impulses embedded in whimsical or, conversely, emphatically simple volumes of figures. They are characterized by meaningfulness of form and imagery. Trying to connect the heritage of ancient cultures with modern civilization, Protopopov presents us with high art of stylization in a contemporary context.
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