Still Life with a Mirror

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.