Alexander Lobanov found himself at the Afonino lunatic asylum near Yaroslavl in Central Russia at the age of 23, and stayed there to his dying day.
At first aggressive, he grew meek and complacent as soon as he took up art. It was a glorious reward for his soul, cruelly robbed by fate. Alexander made his drawings nonstop on every scrap of paper that came his way.
He never started a drawing before making a frame for it. Sophisticated patterns of the frames came as a curtain that divided the mentally retarded inmate's drab routine from the gifted artist's life of imagination.
Toward the end of his life, the elderly artist invented a technique all his own. He pressed paste paints out of their tubes to mix them, and paint with little sticks or matches.
When he was a boy during World War II, soldiers were billeted at one of his neighbours' place. One took pity of the sick child, and promised him-in a joke-to give him a rifle. The man soon forgot it. Alexander did not. From that day on, he was portraying weapons in his every picture for more than fifty years.
To Alexander Lobanov, the rifle stood for power and independence-all he was deprived of. He made himself a cult of the armed man. However, the way he portrayed them, soldiers were not aggressive in the least. They were defenders not attackers.
The artist referred to himself in third person singular ever before the 1970s, when he came to self-realisation. From then on, Alexander was signing his works, first in initials and later in full. His small vocabulary, which focused on weaponry, acquired the word "I". An ungrammatical utterance, "I drawing" came as his supreme self-evaluation to justify his miserable existence.
Alexander soon acquired another passion-photography. More than five hundred of his photo portraits have survived in his vast heritage. He made another stride to take up the collage, pasting up his photograph on previously made paintings. He turned to self-portraiture, later on.
Yaroslavl hosted a pilot art project, THE OTHERS, in 1997, first to introduce the obscure invalid artist to the public. Lobanov's four one-man shows visited Yaroslavl, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Germany and France. California will see his art, November next.
Alexander Lobanov left close on three hundred drawings, more than five hundred portrait photographs, and several dozen notebooks he had made with his own hands. A part of that vast heritage is now on display in his memorial room at the Afonino asylum.
