Nostalgia. Among the hustle and bustle

The word "nostalgia" comes from the Greek words nostos, meaning "to come home," and algos, pain. Turning to the past is an attempt to creatively comprehend the present, a search for the lost truth.

Nostalgia, in general, is a connection between memory and imagination, it is in this context that Vadim Leukhin addresses the topic of nostalgia, dressing disembodied memories in bright fragments of dense paint on canvas. Fragmentation becomes the main element of his style, where the mythical space of nostalgia, retrotopia, is formed from parts of memories.

His characters are more often children, carelessly playing on the streets woven from fragments of the Soviet urban landscape - houses, buses, watering machines, fountains, green spaces. His palette consists of bright, cheerful local colors that create contrasts of planes that resemble either restoration professional gluing, or waves of time, or visual interference that prevent us from perceiving the three-dimensional space of the picture as a “window to the world”, the reality of the imaginary.

Fragmentation for Leukhin is an element of criticism of nostalgia, showing that our memories are not integral, but are made up of separate parts that create idyllic pictures of the past. His space becomes a dream, the world of childhood, which remains inaccessible to the viewer.

Stylistically, Leukhin is close to Eric Bulatov, who taught him how to dissect the landscape part of the picture with stripes of color. However, his compositional techniques were rethought in the spirit of the metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico and the "new" realism of Edward Hopper. Leukhin’s space resembles the deserted solemnity of contrasting planes in de Chirico’s urban landscapes, where dream and reality are erased. The ghostly mysticism of Leukhin’s prose paintings of the past refers to the master of the American landscape, Edward Hopper, who, with the help of color, creates the impression of a special look of the artist, a hypnotizing and disorienting atmosphere. The social and objective in Bulatov was replaced by the poetic and personal in Leukhin. His style is recognizable, you will not confuse him with anyone.

Vadim Leukhin is one of the prominent and sought-after young St. Petersburg artists. Graduated from the State Art and Industry Academy. Stieglitz and at the ProArte Foundation with a specialization in New Technologies in Contemporary Art, he preferred to use traditional technologies, discovering the possibility of using them to talk about contemporary problems and connections between the past and the present.

The new works presented at the exhibition are not just familiar, characteristic images from childhood, memories and dreams of the past, appearing through the hustle and bustle of our time, but also a light nostalgia for the era of hopes experienced now and the fullness of consciousness that simultaneously lives both the past and the present..