Nestor Topchy

From 1989 to 2001, Topchy was Co-Founder and Artistic Director of [Zocalo/TemplO], a nonprofit artist-run performance compound he shared with Rick Lowe and Dean Ruck. TemplO/Zocalo was an incubator for experimental artistic activity, and gave artists of all disciplines a forum for creating, exhibiting and staging experimental and edgy works. The complex housed artists' studios and living spaces, a gallery, indoor and outdoor stages, and embodied the belief that art is a creative and spiritual way of doing anything.

Many TemplO/Zocalo collaborators achieved regional and national prominence, including Andrea Grover of Aurora Picture Show, The Art Guys, Jason Nodler and Tamarie Cooper of Catastrophic Theater, Kevin Cunningham of Three Legged Dog in New York, dancer Richie Hubscher and lighting designer Christina Giannelli of the Metropolitan Opera, Mariana Lemesoff of Helios Arts/AvantGarden, New York painter Giles Lyon, the late video pioneer Andy Mann, and conductor Jon Axelrod . Alison de Lima Greene, curator of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, which owns a bit of Topchy's earlier work, described TemplO as Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art.[1]

In the early 1990s, Topchy noticed rows of shipping containers stacked ten high in the Houston Ship Channel. He imagined the containers as the building blocks that could serve a community's needs in a beautiful way, at once creating a utilitarian and situational art.

In 2004, as part of the Project Row Houses Festival (with the support of Rick Lowe, its then Interim Director Michael Peranteau and in collaboration with architect Cameron Armstrong and artist Jack Massing), Topchy installed a single donated container simply known as Seed. Within Seed Topchy constructed mock-ups of shipping containers converted to habitable boxes re-purposed as a school, hospital, jail, shop, mall and residential living facilities. Seed became the prototype for Organ, a proposed living work of art and architecture and sustainable village to be constructed from 486 steel shipping containers. Organ was featured in the 2009 "No Zoning" exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston curated by Toby Kamps and Meredith Goldsmith, and with further assistance from consultant Mariana Lemesoff, architect Si Dang, engineer Hisham El-Chaar, then Executive Director Heidi Vaughn, the project become an emergent reality. now known as HIVE, or Habitable Interdisciplinary Visionary Environment, the project is looking to reach the next stage beyond planning to acquire a permanent site, grow its board of directors, and build community.

In 2006, Topchy began his "Iconic Portrait Strand", using traditional Byzantine materials—egg-vinegar tempera, minerals, honey, beer, vodka, fig milk, cloves, linseed oil and gold leaf—painted on deme-shaped wooden panels.

During a five-minute session, Topchy measures the composition with a camera Lucida, draws the sitter from life, and takes a digital snap shot for color reference. Topchy paints the image over a period of months. "After the cut out boards are sized, gessoed and polished, a drawing, or graphia, is positioned on the board which feels right for that specific image. It is then transferred with carbon paper, etched with a stylus, and red clay bole is applied to the areas to be gold leafed. The gold leaf is applied first and then finished. The twelve layers of egg/vinegar tempera is applied in puddles to the horizontal board and allowed to sink in and dry. Each layer is an opportunity to be still in meditation and contemplation. When finished, the image is anointed with olipha/oil to seal it."[2]

According to Topchy, "Sitters are recruited through word of mouth via station 32, Haitian slang for the number of teeth in our mouths. Direct person-to-person contact and transmission replace computer hardware with human wetware. Through real-time art, the portraits enjoin individuals in a growing corpus as each new sitter's likeness is added."

"The portraits belong to the Demekon family. Each individual portrait functions like a single gene maintaining an agency within a larger corpus, itself a system and identity positioned within a yet larger unseen agency. As a whole, the entire group is assembled into a socio-cultural strand of DNA," Topchy said.

According to poet Randall Watson, Topchy rejects the traditional notions that divide the sacred and the profane, insisting instead on the equivalent necessity of the ordinary as a container through which the extraordinary is revealed. Such work has an epiphanic, revelatory cast, for while clearly not canonized by an official edict of the church, Topchy's subjects are beatified by context, or in other words, by the artist's gesture. They too, he proclaims, are manifestations of a divine embodiment.[3]

But we cannot fail to notice with some disquietude that all these portraits have 'the look', through and through, of medieval icons! The gold leaf, the flatness, the abstractions typical of iconographical paintings, the vermicular style, etc. are all there. Moreover, they not only look like icons, they have also been executed following rigorously the Novgorod Russian tradition of icon painting in egg tempera that Nestor studied at the Prosopon School in New York City. Thus we come face to face with the most evident of the apparent disparities and contradictions of the work: these paintings are at once medieval Byzantine icons and modern portraits! The conflict is profound.[2]

A portrait by Topchy, more precisely, the manner in which Topchy depicts the features of the heads, often creates this same distinctive feeling of the beyond...they insinuate a beyond. The facial features are articulated by 'calligraphies' of diverse origin, they come not only from egg decorating but also from orthodox icon painting, Chinese calligraphy, expressionism, cubism.[4]

In early 2011, the Ivan Honchar Museum in Kiev presented Topchy's work in a solo exhibition.