Fine art expert / Dashkova Marina

The work of A. Turin, The Emerald is made in a form of decorative picture combining in its compositional structure several genres of fine art. There is a fragment of Eastern architectural landscape with mosques and minarets in the background, against the sky – grand and stately, as if frozen up in eternity; its portrayal is quite recognizable yet unpredictably generalized and asymmetrical. Architectural motif created on the canvas is surrounded by lush yet rather symbolically, almost fairily depicted greenery in the foreground. And among the pictorial blossoming that creates fine musical ornamentality, a piece of still life hides obscurely, looking almost unreal in his left corner of the painting. And finally, on the very surface of the canvas a pale vision, a silhouette of a young man playing on an ethnical musical instrument is sliding, along with the image of a magic eastern bird, a peacock, that appears here as if only owing to the author’s fancy. The painter’s visual language is quite uncommon and corresponds with his intention to create a multi-associational work of art. Expressiveness of his utterly generalized lines induces self-sufficiency and laconicism of local color spots that do no require detailed and meticulous elaboration. His coloring is non-realistic and terse, but the spots of pale lilac, pinkish and emerald, large and smooth in their rhythm, all of a sudden burst into a staccato of brush movements. This peculiarity of the author’s hand, which is rather graphic basically, creates this unusual and distinctive canvas, delicate, full of uncertainty, ambiguity and symbolic meaning.

The painting by V. Peshkun presents a material world created by the author’s thought, the world existing within the intended graphic composition and colour settings that are strictly checked and considered. The portrayed still life brings its spectators into atmosphere of summer day, into the interior imbued with invisible but tangible sunbeams, where on the table covered by checked white-and-blue cloth near the high transparent jar with a huge bunch of sunflowers we can see the tea things, a cake, and sweets “randomly” scattered at the table top. It seems that two cups filled with hot dense tea stand still awaiting a forthcoming tea party. The painter draws his work bravely, in a relaxed, artistic manner. His structure manages to combine fragmentariness of composition leading to the cogency and inherent worth of his images, and the certain stylishness and splendour of created visual scene that coexist with strict and thoughtful choice of few depicted objects. The urge to speak about the visual world in terms of its multi-layered plenitude leads to the representation of objective forms from rather expressive and diverse angles. The texture of the canvas includes pastosity that here and there amazingly turns into painting that almost looses its materiality and density, becoming light, almost ‘aquarel’ and transparent. The author’s coloristic mentality with all its external luminous simplicity is quite complicated. The canvas is composed on eloquent contrasts of open blue, yellow, green, pink, black, brown and white with rare accents of red, all of them enriched with numerous highlights and reflections of color.

The painting by M. Chernyavsky Still Life with a Mirror offers the author’s complicated and versatile sight upon a man and his environment, and their anything but simple interaction, which is conveyed accurately and thoughtfully, almost analytically. Every depicted object exists by its own rules and lives a full-coloured, bright and dynamic life, bearing plastic and coloristic expression and saturation. The author arranges his composition combining several pictorial grounds, figuring out different points of view on this or that object, interpreting forms in various ways, using rich and sonorous colors. A fragmentally depicted table, festive brightness and patterns, the heaviness of books, paintings, frames and ceramics get on with the lightness of china, flowers and fruits and contrasts within the structure of the canvas with the transparency of bottle and vase as well as with the surface of the mirror, reflecting in them in all their corporeity. Completing the development of composition the author portrays a figure of a standing young man in the background, wearing a red jumper with chess pattern which is consonant to the multilayered and ornamental plotting of presented work. This might be a self-portrait of the artist quietly observing the life of the world of objects around him while creating on the canvas a new world of his own.

Azat Galimov’s painting Late Autumn. The Summer Garden is not the only sample of the author’s address to the image of this famous place, which everlasting beauty excites him in any season of the year. On presented canvas the artist creates an unusual, almost unreal landscape of this beautiful corner of old St. Petersburg. Among the falling yellowed trees and bushes against the background of sparse tinges of green on the distant view, at the deserted lane covered with the tapestry of autumn leaves and powdered with early first snow, the three white 18th century Italian marble sculptures stand frozen, and their loneliness adds the canvas lyric notes of melancholy and tunefulness. The work is painted with dynamic staccato brush strokes and its laconic coloring is based upon the few but expressive tinges of ochre that turn sometimes to yellow, and sometimes on the contrary, to deep brown, dark tunes, and also upon the consonance of green and white, erasing the contours and angles of the objective world and lending the canvas exquisite poetry and impressionism of the author’s eye.

The work “Still Life with a Mandolin” by the young artist V. Mikhailov is painted in a genre of classic still life. The canvas is decided in a single coloristic manner, with prevailing cold tones rather expressive and noble in their palette. The author perceives unhurriedly and studies thoughtfully the unpretentious beauty of inanimate antique objects, bringing his spectators into their quiet and mysterious life full of deep inner meaning. He places the selected items on the surface of the table which he locates near the bottom line of the canvas, against the wall with a faded greenish drapery hanging down. The table covered with several cloths of various sizes, textures and designs becomes the place where the painter draws up a still life of his own. This is an image of a white china vase with a chipped edge in a shape of a broad bowl on a stem, two old and empty wine bottles, as if reminding of bygone joys, and a mandolin the body of which, quite expressive in form and workmanship, has also been exposed by time. There is a full glass of wine before the mandolin though, on a small snow-white napkin, as if saying that what we see here is not a world of deserted objects, that life goes on in spite of time’s damaging impact. And the anaglyph sculptural portrait of Dante Alighieri on the wall rises above all the listed items, embodying the eternity of lyric poetry as well as the infinite poetry of routine this earthly world possesses.