Beyond Surreal: Inside The Work of Victor Bregeda
A Rebiours. It is the title to J.K. Huysmans’s 1884 novel that loosely translates from French into English as “against the grain” or “against nature.” The book, which is by no means a classic, is primarily known within a few modest literary circles for its rebellious protagonist (Jean Des Esseintes) who deviates from every conventional aspect of life and sequesters himself from the fabric of society. It is a rather dismal story with an incredibly wretched character. But in the case of Russian artist Victor Bregeda, going against the grain wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Bregeda, who only rebelled against the strict teachings presented to him while an art student at a university in Moscow, was born nearly six-hundred miles south of Russia’s capital in the much smaller seaport city of Taganrog. With the gift of painting running through his blood at such an early age, Bregeda may have learned a thing or two about depth and perspective while he was a student, but ultimately, it was his own innate creativity that he chose to define his art.
If one has never viewed––or more appropriately––if one has never stepped into the world of a Bregeda painting, the first of such an experience is a memorable one. Of course art, to an extent, can be quite subjective: different pieces have different affects on different people. But a Bregeda painting, regardless of one’s opinion on it, commands a viewer’s attention, requiring them to take notice of a distinctly different reality than the one that they currently occupy. Take, for example, Bregeda’s prize-winning “Rhapsody of Life.” Obviously, such a painting has no business in our dreams, let alone our reality: the unblemished, perfectly cracked eggs that levitate over an expansive, seemingly endless desert pour out God’s beautiful creation of life in the developing shapes of man and woman. It is a commentary on the “cosmic egg” eternity of the universe and the divine creation that expands across it.
Clearly, this style wasn’t derived under the influence of Monet’s “Water-Lily Pond.” In order to see beyond the reality that the majority of artists capture, Bregeda chose to stand on the shoulders of such giants as Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Bruegel as his source of a unique artistic foundation. Combining the expansive landscapes created by Bruegel with the fantastic religious imagery of Bosch, Bregeda continues to open up new and unprecedented worlds with his esoteric style of metarealism.
Metarealism is a new style of metaphysical painting, an Italian art movement founded in 1917 by artists Carlo Carra and Giorgio de Chirico. Their focus was primarily on the unconscious mind and how it could be used to depict alternate realities through the power of art. Whereas metaphysical painting (and eventually surrealism) sought to convey the inter-workings of the unconscious or subconscious mind, metarealism, a form of Russian art and literature born in the 1970’s, seeks to explore the many dimensions of the superconscious. According to literary theorist Mikhail Epstein, “‘Meta,’ the common prefix for words such as ‘metaphor,’ ‘metamorphosis,’ ‘metaphysics,’ conjures up a reality that opens up beyond the metaphor, to a region where metaphor carries over or transfers its sense, beyond that empirical dimension from whence it took off. While Metaphorism plays with the reality of the actual world, Metarealism earnestly tries to capture an alternative reality.”
Bregeda is able to capture an “alternative reality” because he goes beyond the limitations of empirical understanding. “Condensed Metareality” is a perfect example of this because it shows Bregeda experimenting with the representational and abstract modes of art on multiple levels of reality. Notice the black cat’s head peering around the frame while his body remains part of the surreal landscape––Bregeda has presented the cat caught between two worlds. In actuality, since the frame slowly disappears, this represents an intersecting of numerous realities. Inevitably, the viewer is left wondering about the different mental structures of the mind and how they overlap.
Aside form the philosophical and psychological concepts that are woven throughout his work, Bregeda also emphasizes powerful religious themes. His best-selling artwork “Eucharist” opened up a series of interconnected paintings, each one full of deep Christian symbolism. “Eucharist” may be a simple retelling of the Last Supper, but the real beauty is in the details: the flame as Jesus Christ, representing Truth and serving as the guiding light for the Holy Word that it stands on; the twelve apostles as the wax, being shaped by Christ’s teachings and connecting humanity to them through the wax ladder hanging off the edge of the Bible. The painting takes our minds into another dimension because the symbols of the flame and the wax are presented in such a manner that they consciously aim at going beyond a mere metaphorical interpretation. In a sense, Bregeda isn’t creating anything new, he’s simply exploring and revealing visions of reality that get covered up by theories and empirical understanding.
Oscar Wilde once wrote, “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.” This may be true, but with Bregeda’s work the viewer has no option but to go beneath the surface. There is too much depth and far too much meaning to deprive oneself of the treasures that lie beneath each and every thought-provoking brush stroke. Victor Bregeda continues to be prolific in his work––still going against the grain with every new world that he uncovers.
>Written by d/visible contributor Ben Millikan.
Photos Courtesy of Victor Bregeda. Bregeda.com All Rights Reserved.
