"When I had journeyed half of our life's way, / I found myself within a shadowed forest, / for I had lost the path that does not stray," wrote Dante of his passage into the afterlife. Birnam wood marches against Macbeth. Nearly every foreign visitor to Russia since the Middle Ages has complained of its abundance of forests, their density and the rarity of clearings. Western forest imagery is consistently aggressive. But the words of Dante and Shakespeare's horror stories encounter indifference from the people of central Russia, where forests - dark or light, dense or sparse - are a way of life. In Russian literature the forest is a positive character; it is treated with respect. The national hero Ivan Susanin was in total harmony with the forest when he misled the enemies to their doom in its depths. The partisan warfare in 1812 and World War II became the stuff of legend. In keeping with tradition, Konstantin Bantynkov's forest doesn't want to hurt anyone.

Batynkov recalls that the favorite book of his childhood was Konstantin Paustovksy's Mescherskaya Storona. The forest is a neutral zone, a place "where we would all like to go", as Batynkov describes it. This is not a place for the Romantics' mystical experiences, but an ordinary habitat. The artist has said that when he takes walks around his dacha in the summer his creative impulses fade away, and the desire to make something drowns in the drone of self-sufficient nature - "the jungles", in Batynkov's expression.

We live on Mars, the artist says, in an aggressive urban environment. Convenience is the payoff for stress and right angles. It is amazing that urbanites spend half their lives hanging in the air, on the fifth, tenth or fifteenth floors of giant buildings. At the same time we are not bold enough to leave the underground and the towers of cities. We hold these excessive dimensions dear. Rodchenko's angles give us a wealth of perspectives and endless variation. The farther we go beyond Moscow's borders, the fewer variations we see. The traveler, be he European or Muscovite, finds himself in the realm of the eternal horizon.

Batynkov's forest is both part of "another life" yet acts independently of it, outside the mesmerizing relationships between people and space, which are so interesting in the artist's work. The forest itself holds particular appeal: it is wet, because of the ink and the rain, and bright as a spider's web shimmering with drops of dew. We are prepared to believe that home awaits us behind each and every bush. Of course, Batynkov does not feed any hopes for a return to the state of the noble savage; it is hard to give up cold cuts and dramatic perspectives.

Valentin Dyakonov.
Translated by Brian Droitcour.