After Language: Relearning a Visual Grammar

Max Trutt

For years I was an editor, the guy who had to call things by their names. I did exactly what the conformist artists from my childhood couldn’t – or wouldn’t – do. Later I started thinking of them as engineers. In a hostile system, engineering was one of the few safe professions: the engineer answers how, not what. You could hide inside the craft. The what was for party officials, chief architects, managers. And it turned out a writer or painter could do the same: hide inside the technique of writing, inside the technique of painting.

Our newspaper’s writers spoke truth to power, pulled masks off, and showed how things really worked behind the scenes. We tried to stay objective and, of course, offered our own ideas for how policy could be improved.

But one day, shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I realized I no longer knew whose eyes I was opening, or why. Politics changes the moment it stops being a conversation. And a conversation, a game among equals, ends the moment those in power remove the last traces of fair play. They rig the field and, without saying it out loud, start a kind of civil war.

From that point on, taking part in public debate, in elections, in civic life no longer feels like a duty. It becomes a move inside a conflict you cannot win. Opinions lose their own value. In an autocracy, the next step is predictable: the government’s supporters turn into conformists, the government’s opponents into dissidents. What remains is a standoff, not a political process. 

I realized I had nothing left to do on that axis. I understood that, as an artist, I had drifted into a kind of wordlessness, and the first thing that came to mind were those Soviet writers and illustrators who drew animals and painted landscapes. Living outside Russia, nothing stopped me from continuing to call things by their proper names. But the pull of wordlessness grew stronger. That’s why I turned to paint and to animals as if returning to a language I had heard in childhood, long before I learned any others.

At the same time, I understood how deeply censorship and state pressure distort perspective. Looking for an uncensored language, the language of fairy tales and fables, becomes almost automatic inside a repressive environment. For anyone who grew up in Russia, it’s a reflex. Russian history and culture are full of strategies of indirection and allegory. Their contribution to world culture may be no less important than that of the officially recognized nonconformists, though it is usually the latter who get celebrated, mostly in retrospect.

There were artists who consciously problematized this situation by taking part in it from both sides. Oleg Vasiliev and Erik Bulatov, for example, illustrated children’s books during Soviet times, creating the figure of an artist who was neither a conformist nor a nonconformist, but something third. “We wanted to draw from the point of view of the people we were in real life, people who were unfree, surrounded by prohibitions and prescriptions,” they once told an interviewer. “What interested us were not the tricks and clever workarounds for getting past the censors’ little flags, but the flags themselves – the very system of prohibitions and prescriptions on which that ‘proper’ Soviet children’s book was built, the one they expected from us.”

A major discovery for me, though, was realizing that an artist can feel that language is exhausted even in conditions of freedom. Maybe that’s one of the starting points of art in any environment. Any society can create the need to change the language or invent a new one – not because of censorship, but because the old language becomes impossible to continue. It gets devalued, turns into noise, becomes partisan, polarizes, turns into a weapon.

As someone who has publicly spelled out all his political positions in plain words, I find anti-war and protest art puzzling. Protest is still speech in a political language. In a broken public sphere it only deepens the break. Trying to legitimize art through protest in a free environment hardly makes sense. Legitimizing art through protest in a situation of real danger is possible, but it creates another problem: how to distinguish an artistic gesture from a political one.

At some point I realized the problem was not censorship at all. The huge tangle of modern and contemporary art, which I had never been able to make sense of, suddenly became less confusing when I stopped trying to catch up on everything I had missed and simply started paying attention to artists who built their own language. Paul Klee was the first anchor for me, not just because of the work itself but because of the remarkable clarity of thought in his diaries.

A major discovery in that whole wave of ‘missed’ art was Cy Twombly, an American who spent much of his life in Italy. Compared to the Soviet realist artists and illustrators of my childhood – many of them his exact contemporaries, incidentally – his logic was almost the mirror opposite. He too hid behind culture in a way, but for a completely different purpose. Like them, he held up a shield of high classical culture – Homer, myths, ancient poetry, but he didn’t illustrate those ancient stories. Twombly even has a work literally called The Shield of Achilles, and behind that shield he built a radically new visual language that later became hugely influential.

He understood that image-making and writing had once been the same action. Writing is a late descendant of the drawn sign. Prehistoric images are tens of thousands of years old, while the first writing systems, built on top of those images, emerged only five to six thousand years ago. His canvas is like an ancient wax tablet: he worked a lot with pencil, writing and erasing, writing and erasing again. He recorded states that turn into letters and back again, like a worn stone with an almost vanished inscription.

This logic matched mine: stop “commenting” on the world and, after accepting your own lack of language, rebuild it from scratch. And along that trajectory – that moves from noise toward your own visual grammar – Etel Adnan naturally appears. Adnan, who grew up in Beirut, studied in France, and later worked and taught in California, came to painting relatively late. For Adnan, drawing and painting became a liberating new language, one that let her step beyond her native yet colonial French and circle back toward the stigmatized Arabic she scarcely knew, to the point that she painted Arabic rather than spoke it: “I didn’t need to use words, but colors and lines.” In this sense, her practice of “painting in Arabic” eased the inner conflict of writing in French, opening a form of expression unbound by the politics of tongue and nation. On paper, this took material shape in colorful compositions and calligraphic gestures, often arranged as accordion-fold books – leporellos – that marked a direct return to Arabic script. The faithful repetitions of words and verses in these works echo the copying exercises of her childhood.

Another important example for me is Peter Sacks: a Harvard literary scholar, author of a highly regarded book on the English elegy, who over time moved almost entirely into painting. His canvases function as material palimpsests – lower layers concealed beneath upper ones – assembled from scraps of fabric, maps, and book pages with fragments of text in different languages. This is no longer a commentary on the world but, for me, a meditation on multilayeredness itself. Sacks’s South African experience, themes of exile, memory, violence, shifts from the realm of theses to the memory of materials: what words usually “retell” here appears as surface. His passage from words to images is, as I see it, a project to rescue meaning from devaluation: when language is exhausted, it continues to live in the layered fabric.

My return to art coincided with an acute awareness of a crisis of language. In such a moment it feels natural to step toward the pre-verbal and, perhaps, the pre-human: to stop before the sixth day of creation. Or to imagine living under a religious ban on depicting the human figure, which amounts to refusing to turn what is made by hands into an object of worship and to compete with the Creator. This work is about reinventing language and trying to read animals as an alphabet.

As an artist, I am drawn to animals as figures of the “other,” perennial companions of people trying to explain themselves to themselves, whom to flee, whom to hunt, whom to compare oneself with, and whom not. This is not the language of politicians, experts, or those protected by status and safety. It is the language of the weak, of those who sidestep an answer, who will not or cannot afford to have an opinion, to choose, to bear responsibility. For me as an artist, this is a way of inhabiting the experience of conformism—or, more precisely, a dedication to all the art that was never made because artists crushed it within themselves. To all who went off into the country of animals, who hid in “school,” endlessly perfecting the craft of rendering the wall within the picture.

One can also understand it as a march through hostile territory—an Anabasis. In that case, ruse, camouflage, and feint are understandable. Animals have a hard time in a world whose fiercest predators are humans. They move by merging with the ground, dissolving into its colors, becoming part of the landscape so as not to be seen.

This is an abridged version of a Russian-language essay published by Vmesto Media on 10 November 2025.

---