About the book: 2023 / "Everything that is written - explanations, interpretations of works - is completely unnecessary. The mystery, the riddle of the image as such, cannot be expressed in words at all,” said Ivan Chuikov. Nevertheless, he tried - and he succeeded. Not all artists master words - their material is different. But conceptual artists, as a rule, mastered it - since the meaning of their activity, in fact, partly consisted in exploring the boundaries between word and image: often conceptualist works are reduced to a commentary or documentation of a really absent picture image. Ivan Chuikov (1935–2020), a classic of Russian uncensored art, unlike many of his colleagues, was engaged in this kind of research without leaving the visual field - his verbal and analytical gift was realized in interviews and letters. From them he himself compiled this book, but, unfortunately, did not have time to see it published. Moreover, the book represents not only the author. It allows us to examine from the inside the artistic movement to which the author belonged and in which he was one of the main figures, but to examine it through very individual optics, the optics of a born painter, a person of “visual talent.” “For me, everything starts not with some idea that needs to be presented in a picture, object or installation, but always with some visual idea, visual image - I just want, I need to make this kind of picture, this kind of installation. And all explanations are a posteriori - attempts to rationally explain, to understand for oneself what is the matter».