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ABOUT THE ARTIST (by Werner van den Belt) :
The
Dutch Years would also have been an equally appropriate subtitle
for this catalogue on Belorussian artist ANDREJ ZADORINE.
In this five-year period beginning with the introduction of his
work in Amsterdam in 1995, he was able to work in peace on an oeuvre
peopled by figures in a highly personal world. He has since settled
in the Netherlands.
There is clearly evidence of new work that can be characterized as
a fusion of two earlier styles, a linear and a pictorial one. Zadorine
began painting in a linear, drawing-like style focused upon recognition
of the motif. Under French influence, he worked with flat planes and
adopted a picturesque style centred around colour and form. There are
also thematic differences with his earlier work. Solitary figures in
a melancholy universe have been replaced by individuals who are observed
and painted in a more philosophical fashion. The world is no longer
constructed by the artist in much the same way as his historical predecessors.
It is now approached with the seemingly casual glance of a twentieth-century
film-maker or photographer.
ANDREI ZADORINE is part of a generation of Belorussian artists who
experienced the limitations of Soviet rule as well as the new political
and cultural openness of perestroyka. He was born in 1960 near the
town of Berezovka in the Russian Ural Mountains, but grew up in an
intellectual enclave near Minsk in Belarus. His father was an engineer
and his mother a cardiologist. As a child he was always drawing and
was a great admirer of Rembrandt's though all he saw were black and
white reproductions of his work. It was mainly the melodramatic atmosphere
that appealed to him. He was not alone in this preference, for his
compatriot Marc Chagall had already described the human aspect of the
Dutch master's paintings as "East Slavic".
Zadorine attended the art academy in Minsk in the early eighties (1980-1984).
Strict doctrines were still adhered to at the time in Belarus, though
Russia was quite openly entering the international scene. Along traditional
socialist lines, Zadorine learned to produce social realistic art,
i.e. recognizable art with social themes for the people and by the
people.
As a young artist, Zadorine did not resist the limitations as regards
technique and theme alike. He was more interested in the work of American
artist Andrew Wyeth who attracted so much attention in Russia at the
time with his interiors and landscapes.
For his final examination, Zadorine painted Souvenir (1984), a self-portrait
of the artist surrounded by like-minded intellectual friends. Though
it bears a strong resemblance to social realism, it also reveals a
calm look to the future.
After the art academy Zadorine did a post-academic course of study
from 1987 to 1991 with renowned state artist Michael Savitsky. It enabled
him to work professionally with a good salary, art supplies and a studio.
The paintings he made in this period are interiors and historical pieces
such as Landscape-like Interior (1989) and The Mournful Meeting in
Kuropaty (1988), alluding to a ceremony in the woods of Minsk where
mass graves were found dating back to the Stalin era. The painting
caused quite a stir, but more because of the technique than the subject.
The depictions were no longer academically painted, they were "modern" with
ample attention devoted to colour and form. This formalism, as it was
called, was not appreciated by his new mentor, who felt it detracted
from the meaning of the work. What is more, it was not viewed as illustrating
the pan-Slavic culture and was consequently rejected.The end of the
period with Savitsky coincided with Zadorine's first trip to Paris.
In 1990, a year so crucial to Zadorine's art, he saw examples of assumedly
decadent and untrue formalism with his own eyes for the first time,
i.e. the Western art of the French cubists and the Parisian school.
The external appearance of his own paintings changed immediately, the
cool colours were replaced by a warmer palette and the paintings became
more like sketches, more modern. In a series of naively painted, almost
monochrome small canvases, it is clear how strong this French influence
was (The Traveler, 1990). He was nonetheless unwilling to abandon figurative
painting. According to Zadorine, a painting should always retain a
human approach to reality and can consequently never become abstract,
since that would be too noncommittal. The French Modernism of art for
art's sake seemed be just as rigid and dogmatic as the Russian or rather
Belorussian social realism with its anecdotal art approach to society.
Free to act but imprisoned between two worlds, it was as if Zadorine
had to choose between his talent at drawing and modern painting, the
linear and the pictorial.
On his second trip to France, there was a jolt of recognition when
he saw the work of Alberto Giacometti. Like drawings in space, Giacometti's
sculptures in bronze demonstrated how feasible it was to combine figurative
with modern abstract art without the human images necessarily having
to be seen as soulless and generalized. The secret was in the distance
between the viewer and art work. From close by, wonderful details could
be discerned in the colour and form, but due to the coarse texture
it was impossible to recognize the person being portrayed. At a distance,
the individual was clearly discernable, but more by his personal atmosphere
than the details, just as we recognize someone more quickly by his
aura or way of walking than by his eyes or nose. The delicate harmony
between sketchy details, expression and atmosphere were also evident
in Giacometti's drawings and paintings. It was striking that the
restrictions he imposed upon himself as regards the technique and theme,
the standing person, the walking person and the bust, were not in any
way at the expense of the options of the imagination. This is also
how Zadorine depicts in his paintings the personal atmosphere of the
individual in a limited number of positions (Composition no. 2, 1991).
As a child, Zadorine read what the Russian classics like Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina had to say about man's romantic emotions and their position
in society. In the young artist, the irreversibility of human life
resulted in a melancholy world view with the atmosphere of the main
character viewed as more important than his individual features. This
was his leitmotiv when he was a student, up until the moment when childhood
memories took over this role. Early in his development as an artist,
it appeared that the portrayal of the human element could not be combined
with complicated figure studies and frivolous themes, but could best
be expressed in motionless paintings with a limited number of standing,
lying or seated figures. Only in programmatic paintings like Kuropaty
did he make an exception to this rule.
As a lover of the Italian cinema of the sixties and seventies, Zadorine
recognized the same interest in childhood memories, melancholia and
capturing moods in the work of Frederico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni.
In his autobiographical Amarcord (1973), Fellini interrupts a snow
fight at a square with the squawking sound of what later turns out
to be a peacock. The townsfolk are taken aback as they watch the peacock
arrive and strut around showing off its feathers. The magical effect
of this surrealistic scene can barely be expressed in words, but it
does make it clear that images describe reality in a different way
than a language. The slow motion way the atmosphere is constructed
is striking. Antonioni also plays with this difference between real
time and perceived time. On various occasions in Il Deserto Rosso (1964),
Antonioni replaces spoken with silent dialogue. In either case, the
story is secondary to the atmosphere that is felt. Although in the
first instance film is a different medium than painting, the similarities
in approach are obvious. With one single image, Zadorine tries to denote
an emotion without wanting to be narrative.
The painting is also something that will have to be looked at slowly,
for a feeling can never be caught in a single moment (In Anticipation,
1993-1998).In the mid-nineties, the balance between figurative art
and atmosphere was to become the main theme in Zadorine's work. It
turned out that modern French paintings did not solely focus on form
and colour. In painting, a figurative depiction of an abstract feeling
could also be contemporary. And indeed the independence of Belarus
had liberated figurative art from its social realistic dogma.
Zadorine experimented with motifs and memories from his youth that
he alternately depicted with sketching and painting techniques to see
whether he could achieve the same atmosphere in different fashions
(The Old Book, 1996, The Dream, 1996). Although any number of attributes
from the past - a gramophone, a hobby horse, a fishing rod or merry-go-round
- have been included in the paintings, it is not Zadorine's intention
to show a story the way traditional art does. The motif merely serves
as an allusion to a feeling, an indication of a memory and as such
should be viewed as a still image from a film, a frame, or as a photographic
snapshot from reality. Film and photography have totally altered how
we look at and perceive the world. The traditional painter would construct
the world and shape it as he saw fit, but the modern artist freezes
the perceived image and plays the game of framing, sharpening and deepening,
and visual sequencing, just like in the film. A portrayal is no longer
an illustration of a certain person or event, but an instantaneous
exposure recording reality.
To emphasize the link with photographic and cinematic observation,
here and there Zadorine makes a few scratches with the back of his
brush when the oil paint is still wet. This "defacement" of
the painting alludes to the celluloid of a piece of film and once again
focuses attention on the difference between fiction and reality and
the feeling that accompanies it. A few of the 1998 paintings reveal
a looser brush stroke. The water colours that hitherto only served
as rough sketches are granted increasing autonomy.
In 1999, Zadorine's interplay between looking and seeing, focused examining
and staring, took a surprising turn. He found some old family photographs
from the thirties, and they became the point of departure for a new
series of paintings. Atmosphere is once again the theme, but this time
it is the atmosphere of the family photographs, with the long exposure
time making them all the more extraordinary (My Missing Grandfather,
1999). There is nothing here of the quick posed picture we know from
modern times. At the start of the twentieth century, photography was
just beginning. To get enough light on the plate to make a sharp print,
the model would have to sit perfectly still for minutes on end. This
resulted in a dull stare, infinite and impossible to capture. The long
exposure time also meant it was impossible to keep a mask on or to
make a face. This is why it seems as if the true character of the individual
is slowly becoming visible. Just as in the sculptures by Giacometti,
a personal atmosphere slowly emerges.
In Zadorine's paintings, there seems to be a link between the time
that used to be needed for posing and the time now needed to get a
good look at his work, the time needed to discover the emotional life
of the painting. It is not the recognition of the model but the understanding
of the perception of the human atmosphere. The philosophical aspect
of the Belorussian years and the formalist approach of his French years
would seem to have joined together in the Netherlands to create a contemporary
way of painting without his having to do without the drawing that is
so important to him.
Zadorine paints as a sculptor, a photographer and a film-maker all
at the same time with losing his love of the medium of paint. Werner
van den Belt. |
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