Sergey Shmelev

Constantine Kansky was born in 1968.
He graduated from Krasnodar Art College.
Since 1992 he takes part in the art exhibitions in Krasnodar, Moscow, and Saint-Petersburg.
Kansky's works are in the private collections in
Russia and abroad - Germany, Israel, Turkey,
Italy, Canada, the USA.

To enter in the fantasy world of russian artist Constantine Kansky is to enter in the fairy tale that takes you from the ordinary life to the ideal land like Earthsea of Ursula LeGuin. That land exists somewhere near ours as the parallel reality that in mystic and subtle way appears in dreams and reveries. There are no cars and skyscrapers, TV and atom electric stations, violence and wars, homeless and "new russians". There the hot cold autumn tenderly turns into the warm summer winter.
Everything is fantastic in Kansky's art - landscapes with the Gothic houses on the ledges of the rocks, on the island or in the wild forest, genre scenes with the strange persons in wide-brim sharp-pointed hats and in medieval carnival clothes. The artist creates his own iconography. Kings, jesters, flying musicians, traveling actors, pioneers, sorcerers and beautiful ladies, philosophizing pilgrims occupy the space of his paintings, travel from one picture to another, creating the strange game of meanings, allegories and symbols.
The creative work of Kansky is a kind of the plastic equivalent to the fantasy in the literature. Fantasy and reality, binding together, create the strange and enigmatic world turning to the mythological past, the Golden Age, when the man doesn't distinguish himself from the realm of Nature and live with it in love, harmony and consent. There the tree turns to be the house, the house turns to be the rock, people knit with the land, water, mountains and the images become the plastic metaphors.

The surrealistic elements tend to the doubling of the images - the man's face may look like the dog's muzzle ("Pug-Dog", 1996), the strange flowers grow through the hats ("Beyond Orthodoxy", 1997); the houses grow from the rocks ("Low Tide", 1999).
The creative work of Kansky is another proof that the world is still living by the dream. He creates the image of the land where you want to live. You can see how the boats are gliding by the always calm seas and how the carnival persons leave them and start to fish or to play on the flutes, violins or strange guitars. There the boy with the wise book on his knees and the goose pen in his hand is sitting on the awfully big for him Vienna chair and waiting for the ripening of the huge fruit that reminds the apple on the Tree of the Knowledge ("Time of Ripening", 2001).
Two men - one is short, old and bald with the basket full of juicy apples on his back, the other - tall young dreamer with the empty bucket and the fishing rod on his shoulder. Who will be chosen by the country beauty? ("The Temptation of Peasants", 2000).
Kansky deliberately exaggerates and hyperbolizes the images ("Bumbling Evil Maker", 2001), the other works are read as grotesque ("Golden Loop", 2000; "Bought Music", 2000). His creatures are funny sometimes, but they are always kind (even the Evil Maker) and they are not dreadful.
The artist creates the earthy, not ascetic but still virginally-poetical images. He understands male and female principles not in erotically-sensual form but as a manifestation of chivalrous high ideals.
This world is without anthropomorphic center, there the being of the man is according to the life of the flowers, trees, streams - everything is in the process of the eternal blossoming, ripening, changing. He constructs in association the archetypes of the mythological mind, grieving for the Golden age. The man is not the center of the Universe, but he is the World - one of the numerous.
Kansky's pantheistically patriarchal idyll gets in the paradigm of the romantic retro-styles expressing the post-modernistic tends to the return of the past traditions and using the experience of the European masters of the XVI-XIX centuries.

Kansky is closed to the painting to the North Renaissance by the techniques and image system with allegories, parables, but without spiritualistic religious essence. His investigation in the field of composition is the deliberate escape from the reflection of the visible space, expressed with the help of the "scientific Italian perspective". Space created by the artist is imaginary, artificial, and phantasmagoric. In some works he underlines the plane in non-deep perspective, in others he uses sharp perspective reductions, in another case the figures or buildings of the background are much bigger those in the front. Often we see the different scales of the human figures or the things (according to the degree of the significance). The King and the Queen detouring their possessions are much bigger than the small houses where their subjects live ("Casuistical Promenade", 1997).
Kansky understands tradition as a touch to the origin, to the pra-image born by the myth, to the higher essence - "Absolute" which cannot be expressed by the words but can be only approached with the help of intuition and contemplation. In that case the creative activity is the pray in silence and in rejection from everything ordinary, social, psychological that turn the great to the banality.
Three hypostases - rhythm, line and color - are participating in that liturgy of the pra-forms on which the linear-plastic action is based. The more open is the color the more is the degree of its emotional influence and the symbolic line is easier to read. The artist uses the broad specter of the colorist search: from the tender warm brown color to the decorative color -bright, contrast, hot or cold. On the scumbling tradition of the old masters he imposes the experience of the painting of the XX century modernists that do not afraid of the local colors.
Standing on the edge of the XXI century Kansky manages to summarize the experience of the past ages joining them with the innovations of the XX century. He brings to the Art Temple his parody grotesque art, his way of thinking and esthetic program.