Igor Dryomin:
Exhibition "Labyrinths of Meanings"

MOSCOW. At the exhibition “Labyrinths of meanings” in the MustART gallery, the Russian public for the first time presents the works of one of the most outstanding artists of our time, an apologist for postmodernism, an innovator and fearless experimenter Roland Delcol.

Roland Delcol was born in 1942 in Brussels. In 1960-1963 studied at the Brussels Free University, then in 1963-1971. at the Saint-Gilles Academy of Arts. Since 1969, many solo exhibitions in Belgium, France, Italy, Israel, Germany, the United States brought him international fame and recognition.

Delkol’s canvases in an amazing way make it possible to see how interesting the result is when two factors are combined in the artist’s creative biography: classical art education of the highest level and a deep understanding of historical processes, philosophy, sociology, art history. Thus, in addition to a purely visual effect, the viewer gets the opportunity to replenish his knowledge, accept the challenge and try to solve a kind of puzzle: to which author, to which masterpiece the artist sends us, fragments of what paintings he shares, whom Boticelli quotes? Jordaens? Titian? Mane? Kiriko? Picasso? Magritte? Delvo?

The artist’s main conceptual mission is to create a new sociocultural space in which the past enters into an active dialogue with the present and the future, thereby opening up various ways of interaction of multiple variations of place, time, characters and archetypal images and creating countless labyrinths of meanings.

In his hyperrealistic art collages, the classic meets the avant-garde, surrealism with pop art, Fauvism with classic Renaissance models. The metaphorical world of his paintings is built on the principle of playing cultural contexts, on the one hand, casting doubt on the value and sublime aura of recognized museum masterpieces of world art, where Venus Botticelli is seduced by the cartoon character Pinocchio, and, on the other, determining new boundaries and possibilities of combining incongruous thereby changing our ideas about a multilevel cultural field in which the avant-garde and kitsch not only coexist, but are also equivalent sides of the same coin.