Architect Andrei Gozak has tried himself in a variety of genres: he designed buildings, wrote books and critical articles about architects, was engaged in design and developed layouts for architectural magazines. Gozak, according to him, has been engaged in fine arts for almost 50 years, as much as in architecture. He began with pasty and bright painting, loved the work of Paul Klee in his youth and, under his influence, wrote something geometric. But then he developed his own, independent from anyone, style of translucent multilayer painting. The technique invented by Gozak resembles architectural washings: paper on a stretcher is primed with emulsion paint, and then mixed with it, Gozak writes “with what it is” - acrylic, watercolor, tempera. He paints for a long time, sometimes about a month, since such a painting requires a lot of underpainting and valers. “Glazes are applied layer by layer until a special glow appears,” says Gozak. - For me, the glow of space and deep color are the main thing. Open color does not give this - Matisse, for example, is a great artist, but he has no depth anywhere. My hero is, rather, Morandi. He wrote a frozen metaphysical life in which eternity exists. And the fact that he has bottles written there - I do not see them, and for me there is no plot - there is only a special state."
Gozak himself is not interested in the subject and genre either - the cycle of 30 canvases presented in the VKHUTEMAS gallery can only conditionally be called architectural. Some of them show the outlines of Gothic towers, skyscrapers or huts. There are also ironic canvases - for example, "Moscow-New York" with the Tatlin tower and the Empire State Building and "Dedication to Luzhkov" with a parody of the Moscow style in the form of pencil houses of all colors of the rainbow. There is also a curious children's cycle, about which Gozak jokingly notes that this is his own discovery of postmodernism: "If Jenks saw the five-column portico that I drew in 4th grade, he would abandon his idea." However, on most of the canvases, for example, in a series of huts painted 15 years ago, the artist turned buildings into conditional spots, while the main thing is light and space. The same values are important for him in architecture as well, Gozak emphasizes: “The material and the decor are already secondary. Ladovsky said that space and mass are the beginnings of architecture, for me space and light. I love Alvar Aalto because he painted architecture with light. In general, I am a supporter of calm, simple, white buildings in which the state of light is everything."
In general, drawing, painting and architecture for Gozak are phenomena of the same order. The painting, according to Andrei Pavlovich, is an image not brought to the building and stopped on paper, building the harmony of space and light. This is how, according to him, many architects worked, for whom abstract compositions became the beginning of projects - for example, Le Corbusier, whose purist still lifes are close his passion for modernism. However, history, rightly notes Gozak, knows completely different creators. Konstantin Melnikov, for example, was "a realist in drawing and an abstractionist in architecture, and this is his mystery."
Perhaps the main message of this exhibition to today's students is that regardless of whether an architect is an artist or not, he must think in images. Architecture is born from impulse, Gozak is sure, and modern computer-aided design, in itself valuable as a tool, cannot give this impulse. Gozak likes to give an example from the work of Alvar Aalto about how the idea of his library in Vyborg was born: "He dreamed about the slopes of a hill over which there were a thousand suns, and he made a library in the form of stepped halls with overhead lights." During his many years of practice, Andrei Pavlovich Gozak became convinced that “only intuition and insight can be this impulse, not calculation, not mathematics, not rationality. The image is born in the fog, in the darkness, and it will always be a mystery."
