Text 1

They say an artist writes their book throughout their entire creative journey. Korolev — samuill marshak — MARSHAC — is an author deeply immersed in literature; in his painterly practices, he tries on a literary manner, tests out style, genre, turns of phrase. Marshak is mistakenly considered a painter, although, in fact, what he does is literature, and the painting is text. The pseudonym itself immediately hints that this is "not the" writer we all know, but a homage to a literary "common place," a homage with an error, with a stammer, in the style of "the cartoon gait of a chicken," as Dovlatov would say.

Korolev is a connoisseur of texts, of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, a member of the "Finnegans Wake" reading club. His plots/rebuses — black humor, conspiracy theories, the grotesque, the subconscious of culture.

But Marshak isn't writing "his own" book; he's playing at being a writer. And why try to write your own book, standing on ziggurats made of volumes of already written literature?

Instead, Marshak mimics a character or a literary style, unexpectedly becoming Lolita, displaying girlish frivolity in his manner, drawing symbolic images of clouds, cakes, and candies; or he dons a beret and mustache, sets up a Leningrad still life with a crust of bread and an onion in his tiny studio, in his spare time sketching Dovlatov's camp characters with a ballpoint pen on wooden spoons and sticks. Tomorrow he's already practicing the "square-cluster" method or painting Levitan-esque fields, then Bacon's dynamic figures appear on them, then a tank rolls through, a butcher shop sign flashes, a snowfall covers everything, a light appears in the window of a little blue house, in the corner — an inscription: "little sky little bread into a warm snowdrift, a twist of rope, and a sliver of soap"... and angels fly... made of rope.

Like Philip Guston, our author has different fa(c)es, but he has his own symbolic set: rope, soap, sack, tool, angel, bread, onion, flag, logos. A moment, tremulous in simplicity.

And yes, marshak tries to erase himself as a student, as a listener of academic classes, and return to the proto-drawing practices of a child.

Everything we "see," or rather read here, is an endless blank verse.

White from snow, from vodka drunk from the elbow, from onion tears, from "kupchaga" to a guitar riff, from Sytny Market to the Velikiye Luki Meat Processing Plant. Marshak's works aren't just pictures, they're text, masterful absurdist grotesque confessional text, and that's precisely why today we take the blow of a stool on our backs from 2026, artificially calm, twisting a smirk on our faces, before Marshak's "Lubki."

Alexander Tsikarishvili
 

Text 2

Lubki — "folk pictures," the most common genre, where one can easily read from what is depicted, and images are organized into rows of signs. MARSHAC's new series develops and radicalizes the method of exploring ruptures and convergences between the textual and the visual: word and image, in the space between which lies all the absurdity and collapse of our life.

And yet we need to understand who MARSHAC is. Marshak is the "little Oscar"* — the eternal child, beating out bourgeois values with his tin drum roll on the floral patterns of tablecloths. He continues to wander in the subconscious of children's book publications, bureaucratic lists, schedules and communal account forms, propaganda posters of social advertising.

One shouldn't try to take away Oscar's drum! Just as it's high time to stop falling into the trap of the pleasantness of painterly glazes.

Oh yes, easier said than done! But the hand still reaches for the silver spoon of aesthetic artifice. And here radicalization becomes necessary: official green — communal blue. Red letters. The syllable — a drum roll. Font — the stencil of postal stamps and railway car numbers. A fairy tale is a lie, but there's a hint in it: "Service is Service, and vodka is vodka!"*

An order is an order! Multicolor is an excess. The gaze of one marching in formation doesn't rise above the communal paint at levels 1 and 6. This is no place for doubt! Here the tin drum beats its roll:

KASHA (porridge)

ZNAMYA (banner)

TUFLYA (shoe)

DULYA (fig gesture)

A grid - a lattice, along which sprouts of... doubt twine?

No.

A breath.

And again, like a stool against the back, the drumbeat continues:

BYL (was)

BIT (beaten)

BOK (side)

BOG (god)

Such is the "Edge." Here every schoolchild must know how to plane a stool. And every citizen must know when to put it to use. To knock out harmful letters from the alphabet: dubious letters, letters that haven't stood up to the severity of vigilant eyes.

So, "LUBKI" is the dissection of language. And language is a tyrant. The language of painting is a deceiver. The language of official phrases, however, is the Mouse King, deploying his army of mindless everyday banalities, making the... dropping of letters quite habitual.

*- quoted from Günter Grass's "The Tin Drum."

Liza Tsikarishvili