Nestor Topchy

Nestor Topchy

One of the Houston art world's great visionaries,[1] Nestor Topchy is a painter, sculptor, installation artist, and performance artist who was born in Somerville, New Jersey in 1963. Since 2001, he has lived on the North side of Houston on an acre compound with his wife and daughter.[2] His work interweaves paradoxical strands of thought, incongruous painting techniques, disparate artistic traditions, and antithetical pictorial attitudes to express a coherent and pantheistic vision of reality.[3]

Contents

Background

Topchy has exhibited and performed his work at galleries and museums such as the Museo de Nacion (Lima, Peru), The Evergreen Museum, Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore), Arlington Museum of Art (Arlington, Texas), The Art Museum of South East Texas (Beaumont), The Museum of Fine Arts/Houston, The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, and Project Row Houses, among others. His artist residencies include The Barn, William F. Flannigan Memorial Foundation in Montauk, Long Island (1993) and The Banff Center, Alberta, Canada (1999).

In a 2002 exhibition at The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston of artists dealing in transcendence[disambiguation needed ], Topchy's work was included along with the artists Helen Altman, James Lee Byars, Vija Clemins, Lynn Davis, Katharina Fritsch, Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rodney Graham, Ann Hamilton, Howard Hodgkin, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Anish Kapoor, Wolfgang Liab, Walter De Maria, Donald Moffett, Ernesto Neto, Raymond Pettibon, Rachel Ranta, Charles Ray, Gerhard Richter, Bridget Riley, Thomas Ruff, Qiu Shi-Hua, Pat Steir, James Turrell, Bill Viola, and Robert Wilson.[4]

In 2003, he was a Visiting Artist/Lecturer on Sacred Art and Architecture at Austin College, Sherman Texas, and in 2005 he gave an artist's talk, "The Artists Eye: On Ikon Making" at The Menil Collection.

In 2009, Topchy demonstrated the art of buon fresco at The Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum. In 2010 he was a recipient of an Artadia Award. Several notable collections feature Topchy's work, such as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the playwright Edward Albee, and Caroline and the late Walter Hopps.

Education and Influences

Topchy holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (1985) and an MFA in Art from the University of Houston (1987). While in school in Baltimore in 1981, Topchy chanced upon an exhibition of Yves Klein's IKB work. Topchy credits Klein's use of a saturated ultramarine blue pigment that represented "the void" as a pivotal discovery. After using this color on spherical sculptures, Topchy realized their connection to Pysanky, the ornately decorated Ukrainian Easter eggs he made in childhood with his mother and grandmother. Following in Klein's footsteps, Topchy earned a black belt in judo under Karl Geiss, which led to studies in Buddhism and a deeper understanding of his Ukrainian roots and identity as a dual American and Canadian citizen.

Work

TemplO/Zocalo

From 1989 to 2001, Topchy was Co-Founder and Artistic Director of [TemplO/Zocalo], a nonprofit artist-run performance compound. TemplO/Zocalo was an incubator for experimental artistic activity, and gave artists of all disciplines a forum for creating, exhibiting and staging experimental and edgy works. The complex housed artists’ studios and living spaces, a gallery, indoor and outdoor stages, and embodied the belief that art is a creative and spiritual way of doing anything.

Many TemplO/Zocalo collaborators achieved regional and national prominence, including Andrea Grover of Aurora Picture Show, The Art Guys, Jason Nodler and Tamarie Cooper of Catastrophic Theater, Kevin Cunningham of Three Legged Dog in New York, dancer Richie Hubscher and lighting designer Christina Giannelli of the Houston Ballet, Richard Olsen of Nexus New York, Mariana Lemesoff of Helios Arts/AvantGarden, New York painter Giles Lyon, the late video pioneer Andy Mann, and conductor Jon Axelrod of Lucerne, Switzerland. Alison de Lima Greene, curator of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, which owns a bit of Topchy's earlier work, described TemplO as Gesampkunstwerk, a total work of art.[5]

HIVE Houston

In the early 1990s, Topchy noticed rows of shipping containers stacked ten high in the Houston Ship Channel. Struck by their resemblance to interlocking Lego blocks, he imagined the containers as the building blocks of a utilitarian structure that could serve a community’s needs in a beautiful way.

In 2004, as part of the Project Row House Festival (with the support of its then Interim Director Michael Peranteau and in collaboration with architect Cameron Armstrong and artist Jack Massing), Topchy installed a single donated container simply known as Seed. Within Seed Topchy constructed mock-ups of shipping containers converted to habitable boxes re-purposed as a school, hospital, jail, shop, mall and residential living facilities. Seed became the prototype for Organ, a proposed living work of art and architecture and sustainable village to be constructed from 486 steel shipping containers. Organ was featured in the 2009 “No Zoning” exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston curated by Toby Kamps and Meredith Goldsmith, and with further assistance from consultant Mariana Lemesoff, architect Si Dang, engineer Hisham El-Chaar, Executive Director Heidi Vaughn. Now known as HIVE, the project has become an emergent reality.

Iconic Portrait Strand

In 2006, Topchy began his “Display-sed Personae” iconic portrait strand, using traditional Byzantine materials—egg-vinegar tempera, minerals, honey, beer, vodka, fig milk, cloves, linseed oil and gold leaf—painted on deme-shaped wooden panels.

During a five-minute session, Topchy measures the composition with a camera Lucida, draws the sitter from life, and takes a digital snap shot for color reference. Topchy paints the image over a period of months. “After the cut out boards are sized, gessoed and polished, a drawing, or graphia, is positioned on the board which feels right for that specific image. It is then transferred with carbon paper, etched with a stylus, and red clay bole is applied to the areas to be gold leafed. The gold leaf is applied first and then finished. The twelve layers of egg/vinegar tempera is applied in puddles to the horizontal board and allowed to sink in and dry. Each layer is an opportunity to be still in meditation and contemplation. When finished, the image is anointed with olipha/oil to seal it.”[6]

According to Topchy, "Sitters are recruited through word of mouth via station 32, Haitian slang for the number of teeth in our mouths. Direct person-to-person contact and transmission replace computer hardware with human wetware. Through real-time art, the portraits enjoin individuals in a growing corpus as each new sitter’s likeness is added."

"The portraits belong to the Demekon family. Each individual portrait functions like a single gene maintaining an agency within a larger corpus, itself a system and identity positioned within a yet larger unseen agency. As a whole, the entire group is assembled into a socio-cultural strand of DNA," Topchy said.

According to poet Randall Watson, Topchy rejects the traditional notions that divide the sacred and the profane, insisting instead on the equivalent necessity of the ordinary as a container through which the extraordinary is revealed. Such work has an epiphanic, revelatory cast, for while clearly not canonized by an official edict of the church, Topchy’s subjects are beatified by context, or in other words, by the artist’s gesture. They too, he proclaims, are manifestations of a divine embodiment.[7]

But we cannot fail to notice with some disquietude that all these portraits have ‘the look’, through and through, of medieval icons! The gold leaf, the flatness, the abstractions typical of iconographical paintings, the vermicular style, etc. are all there. Moreover they not only look like icons, they have also been executed following rigorously the Novgorod Russian tradition of icon painting in egg tempera that Nestor studied at the Prosopon School in New York City. Thus we come face to face with the most evident of the apparent disparities and contradictions of the work: these paintings are at once medieval Byzantine icons and modern portraits! The conflict is profound.[6]

A portrait by Topchy, more precisely, the manner in which Topchy depicts the features of the heads, often creates this same distinctive feeling of the beyond…they insinuate a beyond. The facial features are articulated by ‘calligraphies’ of diverse origin, they come not only from egg decorating but also from orthodox icon painting, Chinese calligraphy, expressionism, cubism.[3]

References

  1. ^ Houston visionary mounts an art exhibit in a funeral home
  2. ^ Glass Houses 6: Nestor Topchy
  3. ^ a b Casas, Fernando. Nestor Topchy: Generating a Pantheistic Geometric Iconography
  4. ^ Indepth Arts News: "The Inward Eye: Transcendence in Contemporary Art"
  5. ^ Bringing Down the House
  6. ^ a b BYZANTINE PAINTER-SAINT DISCOVERED AT DOG-HOUSE!
  7. ^ Watson, Randall. Demekon.

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