Foma Jaremstchuk: An Art Brut Master Revealed

Ako je cijeli svijet mentalna bolnica...



https://www.cvltnation.com/hallucinatory-disturbing-artistic-universe-foma-jaremtschuk/
http://crnahronika.com/


"Foma Jaremtschuk was born in a remote village in Siberia in 1907. He never learned to draw and completed only elementary education in a rural primary school, leaving after his 3rd grade. Nothing is known about his early years, and only from the age of 29 can his history be traced. He was one of many victims of the Stalinist regime, after being accused of slander against the USSR in 1936, he was sent to a labour camp. In 1947 he was found to be mentally ill, schizophrenia being the likely diagnosis, and was moved from the labour camp to a mental hospital for the insane. During this period, and up until 1963, Jaremtschuk produced hundreds of profoundly disturbing, yet highly accomplished drawings, which portrayed his inner hallucinatory world, using whatever materials he could find. Fortunately for posterity these drawings were kept by his doctor, otherwise this extraordinary artist's work would never have surfaced. No work after this period have been found, and as his health deteriorated, he was transferred to a hospital for the seriously ill, and those whose mental health was such, as to be felt untreatable, he died there in 1986.
Jaremtschuk is that rare example of a classic art brut artist, one who was forced to exist in an isolated community away from the influence of the world and art history, hence these dark mesmeric drawings have only come to the public's attention in recent years.
The book 'Foma Jaremstchuk: An Art Brut Master Revealed', will be published on the 17th February. Essay by Colin Rhodes, 120 full page colour reproductions, and translations of 'mirror writing' text.


His work is represented in several important museum & public collections, including recent acquisitions by the Treger Saint Silvestre Collection, Portugal, and will be shown for the very first time in America at the 2017 Outsider Art Fair." - Henry Boxer Gallery



















Foma Jaremtschuk was born in a remote village in Siberia in 1907. He never learned to draw and completed only elementary education in a rural primary school, leaving after his 3rd grade. Nothing is known about his early years, and only from the age of 29 can his history be traced. He was one of many victims of the Stalinist regime, after being accused of slander against the USSR in 1936, he was sent to a labour camp. In 1947 he was found to be mentally ill, schizophrenia being the likely diagnosis, and was moved from the labour camp to a mental hospital for the insane. During this period, and up until 1963, Jaremtschuk produced hundreds of profoundly disturbing, yet highly accomplished drawings, which portrayed his inner hallucinatory world, using whatever materials he could find. Fortunately for posterity these drawings were kept by his doctor, otherwise this extraordinary artist's work would never have surfaced. No work after this period have been found, and as his health deteriorated, he was transferred to a hospital for the seriously ill, and those whose mental health was such, as to be felt untreatable, he died there in 1986.
Jaremtschuk is that rare example of a classic art brut artist, one who was forced to exist in an isolated community away from the influence of the world and art history, hence these dark mesmeric drawings have only come to the public's attention in recent years.
The book 'Foma Jaremstchuk: An Art Brut Master Revealed', will be published on the 17th February. Essay by Colin Rhodes, 120 full page colour reproductions, and translations of 'mirror writing' text. Order the book HERE
His work is represented in several important museum & public collections, including recent acquisitions by the Treger Saint Silvestre Collection, Portugal, and will be shown for the very first time in America at the 2017 Outsider Art Fair.
http://www.outsiderart.co.uk/artists/foma-jaremtschuk

Author: Colin Rhodes

Foma Jaremtschuk spent most of his life in the Soviet Gulag. He was at first interned in a Siberian labour camp, and subsequently in psychiatric facilities, where he died in 1986. Some time in the 1950s and early 1960s, while under the care of Professor Mikhail Kutanin, Head of the Saratov Psychiatric Clinic, Jaremtschuk produced a remarkable body of drawings. Though completely untrained and using only the simplest of materials, he created a pictorial universe that is utterly compelling; at once horrific and a thing of terrible beauty. His cast of characters include large female guards and nurses, deformed doctors and orderlies, and a vast array of grotesque people and creatures that are hybrids of human, animal and machine. Often, these images are punctuated with fragments of angry and accusatory text that characteristically tumble into a kind of indistinct textual mumble, or develop into little rhymes, the charming simplicity of which jars with profane content.
We know very little about the artist from the official record. He was born in a remote Siberian village in 1907, completed only three grades in a rural primary school, and in 1936 he was arrested and sent to a camp. It is likely that he was one of the more than two million kulaks (peasants) who were accused, in dubious circumstances, of opposing Soviet policy and who suffered a similar fate in that decade. Jaremtschuk’s drawings speak eloquently of the appalling experience of life in the camps, as endured by him and more than 20 million other zeks (prisoners in labour camps) over half a century. Though his images regularly spill over into surreal fantasy, they are nevertheless also chillingly realistic reports.     Conditions in labour camps were extraordinarily harsh.  Prisoners had no humanity or individuality. They were a workforce commodity who were worthless unless they were making a profit for the state. Writing in 1938, the procurator of the USSR, Andrei Vishinsky observed that, “Among the prisoners there are some so ragged and lice-ridden that they pose a sanitary danger to the rest. These prisoners have deteriorated to the point of losing any resemblance to human beings. Lacking food ... they collect orts [refuse] and, according to some prisoners, eat rats and dogs.” (1)
People like this appear time and again in drawings by Jaremtschuk. In one picture, a large female guard is covered with massive bed bugs and ticks. They seem to feed on the awesome power she appears to have gained from Communist Party membership – part of the text on the drawing reads, “the woman felt the taste of force – mighty communist force you can eat lard and piss on everyone.” Similarly, there is an awful poignancy in an image of a concertina-playing zek and a naked man, standing with his face raised to the sky. Both cling to their humanity, seemingly oblivious to the figures reduced to dog-like creatures that gather around them. In addition to becoming animalised, Jaremtschuk’s characters are often opened up like medical illustrations, so that viewers (the authorities, everyone) can see everything that is going on in the normally private interior of the body, both physically and in their thoughts. Technology, animals, fish and fungal growths participate in this invasive tearing open of bodies that somehow still cling to life.
The artist’s likeness also appears in many drawings. In one he wears a Soviet cap and is suspended inside a great, grotesque maternal figure. In another he crouches, foetus-like in the exposed interior of a huge skull. Like some infernal womb, the skull holds the Jaremtschuk figure, and forces on it life-preserving sustenance. The presence of an iron-framed bed signifies a hospital environment, since ordinary beds in the camps were characteristically roughly made wooden bunks, or sploshnye nary (communal sleeping shelfs). In another we find him hiding under a bench in some strange washroom-cum-laboratory from a huge hybrid creature that appears to have escaped from an adjacent cupboard. It threatens a figure hanging upside down from laundry drying on a hanger. Another figure sits in a large jar, safe from the monster, perhaps, but trapped within his glass container.
1. Andrei Vishinsky, quoted in Jonathan Brent, Inside the Stalin Archives, New York: Atlas and Co., 2008, p. 12.
https://rawvision.com/articles/foma-jaremtschuk