Exhibition of Nikolai Tuzhilin

“In painting it is necessary that everything grows together, so as not to divide in any way.” In the work of Nikolai Tuzhilin there is no isolated hero, a protagonist, just as there is no impersonal world external to a person. “Everything is a feeling. All about the earth, about people. All from within. It’s a responsibility." In his paintings, the earth and people breathe one life, the plan of the surrounding world and its deep human living become one pictorial matter.

In this dense, multi-layered colorful mass, the artist’s plastic thinking reveals itself with special energy through tonal relationships: “One tone finds another - it is attracted. It’s like love… Tone is the subject. A tone among tones, when found, is mysteriously mysterious and priceless… The color scheme is found every time anew in its poetry. The peculiarity of Tuzhilin as a colorist lies in the gloomy fusion of the tonal base, immersion in the spaces of hidden color relationships, from which, like sparks from a blazing fire, pure flashes of cobalt and blue, ginger and pink, pearl white and gold are born. In his landscapes, the elemental, as if plowed by the wind, rhythms of texture only sharpen the authenticity of the precisely found spot and the boundaries of the form.

The years of professional formation in Leningrad and the subsequent familiarization - at the inclination of the heart - to the Moscow artistic environment - barely touched the picturesque world of Tuzhilin, without drowning out his original nature. His dedication to tonal searches, his sensitive susceptibility to the lessons of the old masters, which make one remember the Krugovtsy, as well as the textured expression of the brushstroke in Moscow, serve to embody a different beginning, returning the pictorial achievements of the 20th century to the mainstream of the classical Russian landscape lyrics of Vasiliev and Savrasov, with their integral vision of a restless, spiritualized space.

His painting seeks "not to depict life, but to be in it." The unkempt asceticism of Tuzhilin’s works, their existence is not as natural as the artist’s living his way, his uncompromising, stubborn to the point of risk immersion in his craft, intense, often bitter thoughts about what is most precious. These are native people, memories of peasant childhood, the imprint of time on houses and household items, the expanse of Russian land, still animated by the fading village life, forever living with pain for its unsettled and tragic fate. Tuzhilin’s painting is unusually careful in a portrait or a human figure, where the light of the eyes and the expression of a face immersed in shadow are only guessed, and the echo of the severe style is softened by tenderness and compassion. This is an isolated, hidden world, not trying to be understood,

Irina Fedotova