Andrey Pakhomov. Painting. "Against Gravity"

From November 30 to December 17, the New Museum of Modern Art in St. Petersburg will show the exhibition “Against Gravity”. The project will present picturesque canvases of one of the classics of Russian late-modern art Andrei Pakhomov. The exposition at the New Museum will be the first significant personal exhibition after the artist’s death in 2015. For the first time, selected works from the Torsos series written by Pakhomov in the last years of his life will be available to the general public when an artist known for his graphic works plunged into experiments with painting.

Andrey Pakhomov (1947-2015) - artist, graphic artist, full member of the Russian Academy of Arts, Honored Artist of the Russian Federation, participant of over 150 art exhibitions in Russia and abroad, the author of illustrations and design for about thirty Russian and foreign publications, co-founder of the Rare book from St. Petersburg. " Professor of the St. Petersburg State Academic Institute named after I. E. Repin PAX, headed the department of graphics and for more than thirty years led a personal workshop. Easel and book works of Andrei Pakhomov are awarded prizes and awards. The artist’s works are in the State Russian Museum, the State Hermitage, the Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts, the Russian National Library, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, the Bavarian State Library, Cabinet engravings in Berlin, Cabinet engravings in Dresden.

The son of Alexei Fedorovich Pakhomov, one of the founders of the Leningrad graphic school, whose book illustrations grew several Soviet generations, Andrei Pakhomov, in his elegant drawings, reflected on the primary elements of graphics - line and volume. Rethinking the aesthetic foundations of creativity, the artist consistently came to his own powerful plastic language, clearly visible in paintings.

A series of "Torsos" is an overcoming of academicism, with which the artist has been associated almost all his life. Expressionist volumes, drawn with a palette knife, painted with a rag and a thin brush, in their rough and precise doneness, represent an impeccably built reflection on the picturesque image. Contrary to the canons of ancient art, this image is imperfect and devoid of harmony. Pakhomov’s torsos revive archaic forms in an elegant, unique irregularity that can be created either by time and chance, or by a great master.

Andrei Pakhomov’s artistic studies influenced his many students at the Academy of Arts. Vitaly Pushnitsky, Leonid Tskhe - these are just a few bright Petersburg artists who attended the Pakhomov school.

Nikolay Kononov, writer, art critic:

Andrey Pakhomov depicts torsos, representing a series of anonymous naked people in a stunning struggle with the irresistible forces of gravity, inertia, concentration, devastation, sleep, silence, history and, finally, death itself. In essence, he, as a painter engaged in the eternal interpretation of the physical, brings nothing new to the endless analysis of naked human nature. On the contrary, he mounts his contemplation today in an expressive series that extends into our cultural memory, which has no edge.

In the history of art, it is always striking that artists are sensitive to the progressive movement of science, as if they have mediumistic connections with it. The discovery of the unconscious, as well as the theory of relativity, coincides in time with the assertion of absurdism and Suprematism as new ways of knowing in art. If we consider from this point of view the “series of torsos” by Andrei Pakhomov, then one fundamental parallel should also be pointed out, and then it will not be surprising that the spectacle of gloomy human bodies by Andrei Pakhomov’s brush corresponds to the discovery of “dark matter” in modern astronomy and cosmogony.

This is a form of matter that does not emit electromagnetic radiation and does not interact with it, therefore, direct observation of it is impossible, but we now know about its presence from the gravitational effects created by it. And therefore, it becomes clear that the bodily, struggling with gravity and death, portrayed by the artist, is only an occasion for extra-lexical cognition of the tension of plastic borders and color fluctuations, not only interacting with our vision, but also generated by it. This new equation without initial and boundary conditions, constantly proved by the artist, elevates our knowledge of ourselves and makes it, unsolvable, undeniable.

Alexander Borovsky, art critic, head of the Department of the latest trends of the State Russian Museum:

“Torsos” mark, perhaps, the least formal period in the artist’s work. Many things are done in painting. Pakhomov feels completely confident in this media: he works in liquid painting on closely related keys, effectively outperforms translucency as a means of flickering and softening the primary color. Again, he does not seem to be interested in the conventional concepts of pictoriality: he is not concerned with colorism as such, but with something else.

His torsos are strange, unconventional, ineffective from the point of view of compositionality cut off… In general, fragmentation at Pakhomov accentuates the moment of naturalness, inadvertence, aleatorism. Torsos do not “tell stories”: about their life, aesthetic incarnation, genre destiny, etc. Sartre wrote that the flesh manifests itself as a pure coincidence of presence. So, the existence of torsos is the presence in our experience. Tactile - when they are bodily, perceptually tangibly touch us. Metaphysical - when they pass by as images of other being. Perhaps it is for them, the torsos, to decide how they are present in our lives - as a bodily touch or as an ethereal shadow…

Andrey Pakhomov. Painting. "Against Gravity"
November 30 - December 17
Wed - Sun: from 12.00 to 19.00
New Museum of Modern Art
St. Petersburg, 6th line V.O., d. 29
www.novymuseum.ru
tel.: (812) 323 50 90
Tickets: full - 350 rubles.,
preferential 200 rub. (pensioners, students)