ZOOMDOUT Digital Visionary Gallery · Nicholas Kalmakoff

7/9/2014

Painting by Kalmakoff

Nicholas Kalmakoff died a lonely and impoverished death in the north of Paris in 1955. The ignored and talented, misanthropic visionary artist went largely unnoticed throughout his productive life as a painter. He grew up on Grimm's fairytales, which on some level, influenced his life as a painter of the fantastical. This, combined with his eccentrically suppressed beliefs on sex, spirituality, decadence and his fascination with his orthodox depiction of a hoof-and-horned devil influenced his life's direction into an alternative world of misogynistic eroticism.

A contemporary actor of Kalmakoff's time named, Mgebrov, recounted a rather peculiar encounter with the talented, but, deranged, devil-obsessed painter:

One day, while I was visiting him, he whispered to me mysteriously that, for some time now, he'd been painting the devil. 'I have all the sketches upstairs' he said with a strange glint in his eye. 'I stay awake late into the night and keep watch for him. I've caught a glimpse of his eyes... his tail... even his hooves... but I haven't yet seen him entirely. Still, I've made hundreds of sketches - do you want to see them?' And, in fact, in the dusty attic of his bizarre little home he showed me a fascinating and frightening variety of sketches portraying the devil's eyes, tail and hooves. He was absolutely certain that these were things he'd seen.

In Mgebrov's memoir, the actor muses on the early works of Kalmakoff, which have unfortunately been lost to us. Mgebrov writes:

All his works betrayed a certain eroticism - an eroticism so overwhelming that it could only be attributed to Satan himself, or worse, to a force even greater than Satan, to something infinitely more awesome and terrifying... A couple of years ago I saw a truly prodigious painting of his... A painting that was pervaded entirely by his hyper-diabolic eroticism. It depicted the sexes of a man and woman in union. But, using that array of colours so particular to him, he created strange rhythmic patterns around them, evoking a sense of mystery. The two sexes were rendered in such a way that you believed you were witnessing the creation of the world.

Kalbakov's visionary paintings were rediscovered in 1962 in Marché aux Puces, a large flea market in the north of Paris. A Hungarian merchant sold forty original Kalbakov canvases to a couple of buyers. Like most visionaries, Kalbakov's obscure work has been admired and celebrated posthumously. Some of his demented works are featured in the ZOOMDOUT "Digital Visionary Gallery" below. Please enjoy a dip into demented imagination.