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Oleg
Torchinsky
Pictures that can hang in the nursery
1998
Sergey
Zagraevsky.
The
works by Sergey Zagraevsky at first sight surprise by an unusual manner,
reminiscent of drawings of children: no perspective, piercingly bright colors –
no half-tones or shadows. Trees, churches, houses, flowers are arranged in rows, not blocking each
other...
Art critics call this style
"naïve". So draw
people who are far from art, – peasants and housewives, miners and foresters,
police officers and dentists. Usually that are old people with
a difficult destiny, who try to compensate in the works that they had not
received from life, and depict their vision of earthly paradise, which they will
not see in this life. They have no submission to the
laws of painting and create so as they are able – simply, awkwardly, clumsy,
but sincerely.
Sergey
Zagraevsky is no miner or forester. He began to
draw when he was 4 years old, his first teachers were his father-architect and
famous artist Tatiana Mavrina, who gave him primary skills of drawing. Then he studied himself: from
reproductions in albums, originals in museums. And drew, sketched always and
everywhere: in Moscow Automobile Institute, where he received the profession of
a programmer and worked as a senior researcher, and in the years of
Perestroika, having gone to business, and in the recent troubled times, while
he was the director of a subsidiary company of a reputable bank. Bank broke, and Sergey today has
lots of time for creativity...
Bypassing Sergey Zagraevsky’s
exhibition on the second circle, one begins to notice that the bright, strange
landscapes the exposition consists of, are written by no amateur but a
professional, and their "children's naïve" is skillful styling,
an artistic method, which gives the author an
opportunity to tell us something important. The composition in his works is
always well calibrated, selection of details is thought out: nothing
occasional, everything is inscribed precisely on its place. Lack of perspective and wild
angles – this is also a well-designed appointment. Moreover, if there is an
allusion to the normal perspective, the author purposely breaks it. As for the
shrill, never mixed colors – purple, yellow, red, green, – their combining has clearly the psychedelic nature (psychedelic technique
is often used in advertising: certain combinations of colors cause desired
psychological mood of the viewer; on Zagraevsky’s pictures they create bright,
happy mood).
Why
did the artist choose for himself "naive" manner? "XX
century – he says – has brought into painting black subconscious nightmares,
pressing forms, dismembered bodies, perverted sexual fantasies in the spirit of
Marquis de Sade. Life is really terrible, and its "truth" is always
with us in its ugliness, so why to drag it into art? Art
should give us what we do not have enough: light, warmth, "pure",
"childish" vision, bright colors. The picture should be such that it
could be safely hung in the nursery, knowing that it
will not harm the baby. "Naïve” art has such properties, and I
consciously choose it and do everything to make my paintings
"childish". Incidentally, at all its apparent simplicity, naïve art gives an artist
the highest demands, and it can not be taught in any art academy. This is more
than painting, this is a state of mind”.
Landscapes
by Sergey Zagraevsky include not only
Published
in Russian: Газета «Московская Правда», 06.11.1998
г.