Who is Rudolf Cuchkin?

Rudolf Cuchkin is a french self-taught visual artist, illustrator and draughtsman. His favorite theme is the portrait, he likes to draw faces. It is a way for him to “meet” and know his subject. Rudolf Cuchkin particularly likes to draw men to transcribe their beauty and try to capture their aura. These men are most often sensitive, sensual, sexual.

His work is a subjective interpretation, sometimes dreamlike and poetic, of the (gay) man through Rudolf Cuchkin’s personal history.
His sensitive universe, free from an aesthetic ideal, invites the spectator to make his own interpretation, to tell his own story and why not to question himself.

His art draws, among other things, from Greek mythology and its symbolism, eroticism that stimulates the imagination and desire, pornography, raw force, which exults the impulses, but also in the aesthetics of fashion photography and pictorial art in general.

"Whoever wants to know me from an art point of view, the only interesting thing is to look carefully at my paintings and try to see in them what I am and what I want to do"

- Gustav Klimt

Why?

Rudolf Cuchkin loves his work and what he does.
It is the pleasure and sensitivity that drives him to draw and this since his childhood. He likes to put words, emotions and feelings into images.

What inspires him and at the same time sharpens his pen are the aesthetics of “Colt” and “Falcon” films with its virile and simple men, the mustache and red shorts of Tom Selleck in “Magnum”, Leroy character of the film “Fame”, Jean Paul Gaultier and his clip “How to do that” directed by Jean Baptiste Mondino and illustrated by Thierry Perez, the painters of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the symbolists in particular and painting in general, artists like Keith Haring, Jean Paul Goude, René Gruau. … musicians like Prince (and the Revolution), Björk, Matthew Herbert … etc

How?

Rudolf Cuchkin works most often from a photo because he likes to reinterpret the images, recreating from a base, he lets his feeling do the rest and his pen sublimate his subject.

In an easy way, he works almost without using an eraser…
Working with a ballpoint pen requires a certain concentration and mastery because you can’t erase and that leaves no room for error!
Rudolf Cuchkin usually leaves his backgrounds plain, so that the viewer can concentrate on the subject.

His plastic creations are made with different mediums, supports and techniques according to his inspiration: Acrylic, pencil, pen, collage, handmade silk-screen printing, digital photography, etc…