Published in the Catalogue for the Exhibition “THE INNER LIGHT”, 2002
Naturhistorisches Museum Wien
ISBN 3-900275-89-0
The Inner Vision
Bernd Lötsch about the blind visionary Sergey Popolsin
He paints so much better than many painters who are able to see, remark those interested in art in amazement when they see the expressive works by Sergey Popolsin who lost his eyesight so tragically.
Can it be that the inner light, which glimmers from the time when he was still able to see, is a stronger artistic impulse than the daily view of the world around him could ever have been?
Can it be that the strong emotion of having gone blind after his suicide attempt has given him the impetus to mature fully as an artist?
A high price to pay, undoubtedly...
Indeed, he only started to sell paintings during that phase of his life. They must have been good earlier on, delicately drawn, very different from what they are now. He did not sell them then, one does not give ones children away for a pittance, that seemed dirty to him: “They were lying about all over the place... I showed them to friends, acquaintances, students and artists, and then, when I was taken to the hospital, friends started to fight about them. ‘This one is mine. That one is yours. Wait, I will give you that much, if you let me have that one!’ A nightmare. I just burnt all of them...!”
One sheet remained - significantly a skull on it.
“I had my first exhibition when I was already blind. I started working again because my acquaintances collected money for me, because they fed me, because they paid my fares, clothed me. It was my aim to paint a few pictures, to sell them, to pay my debts and then... for the last time, to leave this world behind me.”
Instead, recognition brought him back to life:
“For goodness sake, it cannot be true that someone has use for this! I myself cannot tell whether it is any good as I cannot see it, but all tell me that it is much better than before.
An exhibition is like a striptease of the soul. In unison with oneself and the canvas, you lay yourself bare in the painting. When one of a million, a single person, looks at the painting and silently goes closer to it, I have the feeling that he has understood me as a human being in that painting. I do not need more.”
Now, there is no stopping him. He marks his tubes of colour with different notches on the caps; some long thin pins, which he positions on the canvas, serve him as orientation aid. With clear strong colours, he reflects visual expressions from his other life.
But how is it possible, even psychologists ask themselves, that he - without being able to see - can play with optical illusions, paint the brilliance of a glass so perfectly as if it had stood in from of him. It stood there, certainly - ten years ago.
A holographical conciousness?
It sounds heartless, but, although awe-inspired, one being a natural scientist begins to ask curiously: How long does the world of colour continue to glow inside oneself? Do the colours fade, do the pictures of remembrance darken? Does he still know after another ten years what a red is, or a blue?
Why can he, a blind person, give the seeing so much with his paintings? Strange realities from his other world. “Through this viscous blackness, through this impenetrable darkness you see a light, from somewhere”. From within him.
Did not Goethe already say that we do not see what we see but we see what we know, and Edward Munch, the great expressionist said 'I do not paint what I see but what I have seen.'
Why did we want to show these works of a blind person in the Nature and Art Gallery of the museum? Because the extreme case of Sergey Popolsin, the man who always goes to borderlines, and yet overcomes them - between life and death, between total darkness and magical light as at the end of a tunnel - helps us to find out about the nature of art, about the fire of the colours as an expressive message from eternal darkness.
Univ. Prof. Dr. Bernd LÖTSCH
General Director of the Naturhistorisches Museum
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