VLADEY presents the exhibition of less young artist from St. Petersburg samuill marshak.
less is the name of one of the works presented at the exhibition: “лес / less” is a play of words of the Russian and English languages, which is revealed in a graphic manner. In the word “less”, the artist establishes the aesthetics of the “decline” in relation to traditional academic painting, which he studied at the Academy of Arts (St. Petersburg State Academic Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture named after I. Repin). samuill marshak came to such works through the internal destruction of the skills of vocational training and the imposed opinion of an authoritative professor. “Attempting to acquire innocence and immediacy, making it possible to realize the unimportance of what is happening, is the main theme of my work,” says the artist. In addition, the deliberately simplified plastic solution of the pattern and composition reflects the “pretense” of our reality with its “cult of youth” and the widespread resistance to social adaptation and emotional maturity.
The artist with the name of a well-known children's writer creates his paintings as if on the fragments of deep memories, first impressions of his acquaintance with the world. It seems that they are as simple and sweet as Samuel Marshak’s poems and tales. In them, as in the children's consciousness, there are no hierarchies and determinations, therefore, the substitution of concepts often takes place. The world turns into a set of equivalent objects - people, animals, fruits, trees, flowers, football fields, a family dinner, a landscape, toys, military rockets - all this is an emotional memory that does not carry any meaningful values. The pictures attract with their sincerity and weakness, their images and colors are touched. But at the same time, there is a feeling of non-child anxiety and sadness: it seems that deep-hearted experiences, the impossibility of genuine “awareness” and “experience” of the world around are exposed with sincerity. This atmosphere is favored by the painting style of samuill marshak, which can be compared with the neo-expressionism of the 1980s: color intensity, thick layers of paint, coarse broad strokes add brutality and emotion to images, recalling, for example, the drama of Rose Wiley.
“Do good authors always write good stories? As a rule, in nature, the brightest plant and animal is poisonous ”(samuill marshak).
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