"As Vishnu created the world in his sleep, I imagined my world of divers, creatures without faces, their hearts kept deep within diving suits, when I immersed myself in sleep, in the depths of subconscious, where underwater fish surrounded their loneliness with Christmas trees."
Leonid Tishkov

Since 1989, Leonid Tishkov has been creating a growing family of Deep Sea Divers. Produced from the artist's own subconscious, these mysterious characters thrive in an unpredictable world full of surrealist imagery and absurdist text. Beyond their cartoonish appearance, they present a black and white mirror of our own life, where distorted reflections of our fears and fantasies embody our existential alienation and acute self-awareness.

Tishkov grew up in a lakeshore village surrounded by the woods and mountains of the Urals. Steeped in folklore and rooted in the earth, the picturesque Nizhnie Sergi verges on the symbolic border with Asia. After almost drowning at age six, the artist acquired a fear of water and never learned to swim.
Considered strange and unsociable, he engrossed himself in observing nature and devouring books. In the early seventies at the height of the Cold War, he moved to Moscow to study medicine. It was only a matter of time before he realized his poetic temperament was better suited for the arts. Years later, his work, whether it is painting, sculpture, drawing, prints, writing, performance, or video, still bears the formative influence of his village experience and medical training.

A Vodolaz (voh-doe-laz) or DSD is a creature first and foremost of the unconscious, protected by a diving suit and kept alive by an oxygen line. Its exact nature changes constantly. It is only in the shedding of its black exterior, its social skin, that its inside reveals itself, and a DSD attains freedom and understanding. This lifeline bears an immediate and strange analogy to the human umbilicus: the DSD carries a phantom cord that is pulled at death, when it returns to a state prior to birth. On a meta-level, the artist considers the underwater world of the DSDs to be a fitting model for Russia itself: not yet fully engaged, its people still slumber and move slowly.

Tishkov's works on paper weave enigmatic narratives onto abstract compositions of shapes and words." What joy a new dress can bring!" features a young DSD arms wide open and facing a kneeling, sympathetic mother. Another domestic scene presents a Vodalazes objects from velvet. 1995 mother and father DSD taking their trusting daughter for a dip. Other drawings reference art history, including The Potato Sitters. This forlorn image of DSDs in a field alludes to Van Gogh's Potato Eaters, while underscoring the importance of potatoes in the Russian diet. "The Suffocating lead the unseeing," re-interprets Bruegel the Elder's haunting portrayal of the plague into a gripping vision offailed leadership.

By contrast, many show a single DSD, such as one who has lost his helmet's little window or another who wanders aimlessly with his helmet constrained in a fish tank. Several others use metamorphosis to make their point. In one scene, the helmet of a standing DSD has transmuted into an onion dome radiating light. It reads simply: "One turned into a church, while the other one got down on his knees." Another shows a birch tree sprouting from the torso of a DSD, and serves as a metaphor for the nationalist agenda currently being cultivated by Russia's leaders. In a sad indictment of American infiltration into traditional culture, still another depicts the head of a DSD as a Big Mac.

Both psychoanalyst and patient, Tishkov plunges underwater to explore his own unconscious, resurfacing with frenzied fragments of knowledge that he recycles into fantastical tales. While his repetition of a central image and his playing with language reflect a conceptual bent, his work is essentially surrealist, privileging the dream and the emotions. In his fervent and ongoing battle against conventional logic, he reconciles the banal and the absurd into koans of haunting beauty and allusive meaning.