"City Chimeras." Painting by Alexander Alkhovsky. 16+

Painting by Alexander Alkhovsky from the twentieth century. The artist’s works read a very personal, but very characteristic for Soviet artists, experience of the art of modernism. Alexander Alkhovsky son of a teacher at the Institute. I.E. Repin David Alkhovsky, a student of Isaac Brodsky and contemporary Pavel Filonov. Alexander Alkhovsky became an eyewitness of the artistic debates of academics in his father’s workshop, while being carried away by cubism, Salvador Dali, and, of course, Pablo Picasso. Since 1996, the artist lives and works in Hamburg, often visiting the family workshop on Vasilyevsky Island. Alexander Alkhovsky did not lose his curiosity in contemporary painting, and is well aware of popular trends, such as the Leipzig school, although he makes a reservation sometimes, calling Yves Klein “a modern French artist”. This is due to a special kind of rejection of excessively rational, conceptual art and tradition of arranging shows from the presentation of an idea. Contemporary art for Aleksnadr Alkhovsky lies in picturesque problems - the drama of color collisions and the destruction of form, that is, ideas that still excited the Fauvists. In the artist’s speech, capacious quotes and formulas of favorite cubist masters, academic teachers or Pavel Filonov slip through every now and then.

The aesthetic views of the author do not seem so archaic, if we recall that contemporary art with its orientation on the personality of the author, on the search for an individual style and loosening canons is not much different from the art of the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that is, from the art of romanticism.

In 2017, the poetic collection of Alexander Alkhovsky, “Heaven’s hole”, illuminated the gloomy world of painting with lyrical revelations. In the grotesque fantastic chaos of Alkhovsky’s painting, one can’t immediately discern the lyrics that do not let go of a notebook with full-scale sketches. Both in painting and in Alkhovsky’s poetry there is a lot of irrational. This artist belongs to the type of carriers of twilight consciousness - curious visionaries, for whom reality is a stream of mystical images. The lyrical hero of Alkhovsky languishes with insomnia. He sees blockade shadows appearing on the walls of the old workshop and he hears the wind running through the roofs in iron boots. And the picturesque and poetic images of Alkhovsky have a common chimerical nature.

Working on a large-scale canvas, Alkhovsky acts as a caster of chaos of his own imagination. The artist is perfectly armed with pictorial tools and discoveries of the twentieth century. Thus, a curious situation arises in which the painter can explain the nature of each movement of the brush, becoming a prisoner of his own images, which often remain a mystery to him. As in the work of Picasso, in the paintings of Alkhovsky a fragmented, unsettled, conflict world is revealed. This is a kind of terrible mask of reality, revealed to the viewer with the help of the hard, hard hand of the painter, who knew all the wisdom of dismemberment and modeling of the world. Alkhovsky’s peculiar “analytical cubism” is still relevant today, since we still know very little about the dark side of human nature.