Добавлено 15 авг. 2016 г.
About art, just like about true love, it is hard to talk: the words become too small for subtle and deep experiences. Beauty needs no explanations or interpretations. Except perhaps time that it needs – the time that would be enough to contemplate the beauty in its entirety, in all the nuances.
The idea that the world is not what it seems carried itself from the previous century to the current one. Abstractions and symbols saturated art. They insist on thoughtful attitude, careful deciphering. We are obliged to guess what an author meant to say through fancy arrays of multicolour lines, bright spots, nervous brushstrokes. To get inside the thoughts of artists, catch their sensational outburst, a spectator should, time and again, resort to the services of art experts – keepers of sacred knowledge – who, like pagan priests, are willing to explain the substance of what is happening to the mere mortals.
At the other extreme – there is pseudo-realism: a repeatedly sweetened longing for the merchants’ chic. “Make it to be beautiful for me!” – exclaims a customer demandingly. And an artist makes it. Though these pompous, “opulent” paintings are merely a customer’s dream come true that will not become legacy for children and grandchildren, nor value, nor capital. Except maybe a family memory, an expensive substitution of a plush album with amateur photographs. The true, real art blinds not the eyes, claims not the sacrality of perception.
Still-lifes by Victoria Belakovskaya, unbound and free as they appear, are like an air kiss, a spacious and light stroke: not buds of flowers, instead – buds of colours. Their touching incompleteness is a draft letter as if the intended thought not fully took shape: there is something to think about. Vases, fruits and flowers by Victor Proshkin are more tranquil and, in an academic way, even reserved. Still in his paintings, there appears in its entirety an emotional depth of colours, so acutely exhibited by Petrov-Vodkin, in whose studio both Victoria Belakovskaya and Victor Proshkin took classes. And perhaps the most precious thing in these artworks is the irony. A master’s smile that turns “funny” soviet-period wallpapers into pieces of winter clouds and rhymes a traditional march mimosa with a plastic-yellow half a lemon.
Still-lifes by Vladimir Proshkin are minimalistic and refined. One finds no randomness in his watercolours as if the artist can see every detail and keep them in the memory: surface of a table, ceramic warmth of a jar, shade of leaves. This homage towards the nature, that is more characteristic of the art of the Rising Sun countries, is conveyed to and perceived by a spectator. He lets feel a mystical joy – the moment when what was thousandfold seen before regains a new meaning.
Art is timeless though it bears an imprint of time. The trace of epoch remains on the portraits, it is captured on the canvas. Time demands recognizable features, expressions, postures. Mouths half-curved downwards like half-mast flags, eyes locked inwards are such a familiar outlook of people of the developed socialism era. There are those still alive who remember everyone wearing such faces in unison on weekdays and on holidays. Mimic clichés of the past dissolved in the new millennium, disappeared along with soda water and the “glory to the Soviet Union Communist Party”. Yet it is enough to observe more closely so that the genetic memory responds with warmth: a grandma’s neighbour could be like that, a co-worker, a distant relative from Astrakhan or, for instance, from Nizhny Novgorod.
Art may not belittle itself to a colour spot supporting an interior. Art’s service is noble and not utilitarian. It does not merely empower to see the world with an artist’s eyes, it grants to everyone of us, viewing it, an additional vision, a new perception the frequency of which used to be out of our scope before.
Victoria Chernozhukova for SOFIA Events & Gallery