Dramatic themes, laconic compositions and folk mysticism form the central themes in the work of St Petersburg artist Vyacheslav Mikhailov who is currently enjoying an exhibition at the Russian Museum's Marble Palace.
The exhibition, which continues until August 27, is a retrospective honoring the artist on the occasion of his 50th anniversary.
Mikhailov was born in 1945, in a small village of Arzgir, in the Stavropol region of Southern Russia. In 1977 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg where he majored in painting, taking his tuition under the distinguished Russian artist, Professor Yevsey Moiseyenko.
From the early 1980s onwards, Mikhailov's pictures figured prominently at various exhibitions in Russia, Europe and America. Some were sold for considerable sums of money at Christie's and at other leading auction houses.
His works have been acquired by the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.
Mikhailov has a reputation as one of the most serious masters in contemporary art in St Petersburg. He possesses a genuine painterly professionalism and profound philosophical insight that makes his contribution solid and guarantees emotional validity.
Mikhailov has paid due attention to dramatic themes, having created a set of paintings with certain existential, grotesque social elements. These can be seen in "Carnival", "Games", "Dreams", "Curiosity" and "Carrying."
Such pictures as "Curiosity" and "Struggle" appear as ridiculed false heroes -- idols showing their empty insides. Clumsy figures twist and whirl in a carnival dance, flashing crudely painted masks, sporting superimposed noses and bellies.
Sometimes these reduced figures merge, as in "Embraces" where the spectator's eye wanders across scarcely differentiated forms which lazily transform into one another.
An occasional sharpness of focus shows a precise detail --a claw spread greedily or some similarly monstrous face.
In recent years, Mikhailov has returned to the ever-timely source of national folk art. He associates it with the unforgettable impression that Russian wooden folk sculpture and architecture made on his mind.
It explains why his new series of paintings -- some 40 works in all -- are called "The Russian House." From ancient times a house and home occupied a special position in human life.
Without exaggeration one can say that the lay-out, construction and consecration of the traditional Russian cottage (izba) reflected people's magical beliefs.
The house was always built in a certain way, according to the horizon, stars, calendar cycles and family rituals. The Russian house was protected by forces of light, but there was a special corner in it reserved for the twilight, darker, natural spirits.
The painter now moves with the same naive, idiosyncratic faith and happy faultlessness of hand, as an unknown Russian foreman, who respectfully processed century-old tree trunks for his use, be it for a wooden house or a saint's statue, a boat or cemetery cross.
Timber is for him somehow spiritual and it seems warm, living and breathing in "Window Frame" and "Peaked Fence." In a live, asymmetry of knobbly trunks with their rough surface, one can see the pulsation of natural juices, sensitively answering a palm's touch. Some pictures, "Entrance", "Walls" and "Windows" represent what seems to be the architectonic elements forming a house's skeleton.
But by encouraging a sense of ambiguity, the painter leaves the viewer at liberty to choose any interpretation. Mikhailov shows extraordinary vigour -- both mental and physical -- and his work is undeniable and quite impressive.
"Composition",
1994 by Vyacheslav Mikhailov.