MOSCOW 19.02.1019

Our exhibition project is an aesthetic dialogue between two authors, Sergey Bryukhanov and George Mayer – between a painter and a photographer, united by similarity of biographies. Both of them have been through the formation of a creative personality in the tradition of Nizhny Tagil art school and inherited the spirit of liberated plastic thinking. The trick, as always, is in perspective. In the optics of creative consciousness, which allows the artist to capture the harmony of the world even in the routine of everyday life. Some delicately recreate the world of ideal natural forms on canvas and in shot, being proficient in the skill of optical illusions; others, such as the Moscow painter Sergey Bryukhanov, not less delicately, sensitively orchestrate the polyphony of color harmonies of the world, without having to reproduce the external similarity of its forms.

The central “figure” of Sergey Bryukhanov’s works is the color spectrum. Being subtly graded, it is embodied on the canvases of the artist in a variety of shades in holistic specific vibrating color membrane. The color in “Bryukhanov style” is the light that passed through the prism of the painter’s sensual perception. According to the author’s concept, the white canvas is similar to an absolute purity of a newborn soul, replenished throughout life with a complex spectrum of sensory experience. “That is how the spectral cycle of my works embodies the vast variety of emotional states of the human soul – from lyric to dramatic,” says the artist. “For me my color palette is thoroughly and thoughtfully determined, like the tonal range of music for the musician: the intonation of the work is very important. A-major or A-minor is a big difference! I call it ‘color-direction’.”

A similar principle of shaping of forms can be seen in the plastic solutions of shots by photographer George Mayer. Except that his spectrum is achromatic, it is the full range of black and white “palette”. Working in the genre of staged photography, this young Uralian author created his own language handwriting in working with light techniques of studio shooting. The aesthetics of his shots dates back to the style of European modernism of the early 20th century, to the works of the Czech photographer František Drtikol, whose experiments with light and shade influenced all the subsequent development of fashion and nude photography.

“In modernism the cult of a woman and eroticism was associated with the aesthetic principle of the Trinity of life, passion and death,” says George Mayer. “The image of a woman in this interpretation became a figure of sacred and fatal, attractive and dangerous at the same time. Developing this idea of the female image, I imagined the ideal of femininity as a certain symbol of counteraction of darkness and light, of good and evil. Shade in the shots stands out as a separate character, at times absorbing, at other times splitting the image of a person. And in that drama the person appears in the shot as the light source.”

Light and shade are two opposite poles of a single light spectrum. As two active contradicting forces, they develop each other in the most eloquent way. The line of their contact is always unstable, mobile, it transmits the variability of shape and the permanence of space at the same time. And this transformative feature of light cannot but inspire artists to new environmental solutions.