NIKOLAY REZNICHENKO

Nikolay Reznichenko
6 to 19 December 2008
The anniversary exhibition of
St. Petersburg Creative Union of Artists IFA.

A strange, as if numb sadness reigns in his paintings, the figures are full of tired grace. The characters in Reznichenko's paintings seem to be in a distant kinship among themselves and at the same time strikingly individual. They are related by the thoughtful melodiousness of the lines, "Soldered" volumes in the plane surface of the canvas, which resemble a kind of picturesque bas-reliefs, frozen in a stopped sharp movement. Muted, exquisitely faded, subtly nuanced colouring, the ability to fit a figure into the background with a well-thought-out architectural accuracy gives his paintings a special artistic "made", completeness, "well-being". But his heroes are inside this balanced perfect composition and, even in spite of it, keep psychological tension, unspoken bitterness.

Reznichenko - and this, perhaps, is the secret of his paintings attraction - by the beauty of dull inflorescences and musicality outlines leads to the synthesis of anxiety of souls and the tranquillity of "artistic matter," the very poetic fabric. His canvases aestheticize vague sadness and allow you to see beauty, anxiety, thereby defeating it.

Mikhail GERMAN
professor, doctor of art history,
Academician of the Academy of Humanities,
member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA),
chief researcher of the State Russian Museum

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