A brief, emotional period of moral catharsis. Breaking free of the inner beast of a great empire, peoples began to stir, to mix together in space. Dogma was overthrown; in art, a grotesque, evil mocking smile at the dying throes of the socialist construct. I began to project my individualism, my personal views, on the film of life and on the puzzle of reincarnation taking place all around me. In my paintings, like little safety boxes, I quickly nailed a summing up of the dying epoch to preserve this difficult experience for future revision.
Unambiguous assessments don’t suit me, which is why my “Pedestrians” continue to go places and “The Destroyers of Ideas” only break the symbolic notions of ideas, while Vladimir Lenin with his piece of wood possibly has not said all that he wanted to say. My works from this period were not so categorical and caustic as with artists of the Moscow SOC-ART circles and art critics tended to write that my Ukrainian SOC-ART was softer, that it had a “human” face.
NOTE: SOC-ART was a kind of anti-Socialist-Realism phase among young artists that blossomed in the early years of perestroika. Tartakovsky’s painting, “One quiet, early morning...” became the best known of the Ukrainian art scene: Lenin in his cap and jacket, holding a plank of wood in his arms against the background of a forest.
Anatoliy Tartakovskiy, 2012.