Oleksandr Nekrashevich / The Labyrinth Personal Exhibition
27.03.2008 — 24.04.2008
One fall from grace by Alexander Nekrashevich
Just one, but a large scale one. Not quite Adam and Eve, but rather Cain and Abel. The story of a fall from grace was called the graduation work of A.Nekrashevich then student of Monumental Department at Belarusian State Academy of Art. The colossal frieze that retold the story of man as a story of eternal fraternal hostilities was presented to the public in 1997. It was not because of the subject that his graduation piece got noticed. Indeed, who can you surprise in Belarus – former Belorussia and BSSR – by painting war, canonic in the past (the degree of cult of war heroics by far exceeded the general Soviet Union level, truly the Belarusfilm studio was nicknamed "Guerillafilm"), and signature today.
Nobody in Belarus is surprised by monumental art. In the 1960s and 1979s – when the fashion called for an austere style - the Belarusian art classrooms caught the chronic ailment of gigantic canvases. At the time, graduates from a Minsk school had no easy time entering other universities, where the examination might call for painting a nude with multilayer glazing on a canvas of only 60 cm.
That quite adult claim by Alexander Nekrashevich - by the time of his graduation, Alexander had already participated in many exhibitions and painted monumental pictures to order - surprises you with its lack of habitual rhetoric in interpreting the war theme, contrasted with its metaphysical dimension. The work is free from the new religious demand, that has replaced the officious themes of the past. Those properties make the work of Alexander Nekrashevich a significant and curious phenomenon in the background of his fellow painters. His refined military-esthetics are steeped in the aroma of blossoming sakura whose concentration is dispensed so accurately that he might never be suspected of indulgence of the universal sushi-boom that has spread far beyond the gastronomic realm.
The Japanese improvisations are especially refined in the current project. A beautiful Nippon-fantasy: mysteriously immobile samurais with spears appear frozen - for a moment or for eternity – in that dimension all is one, and the agonizing tension of immobility has a strange entrancing effect. They all are likely to be already dead, but nevertheless beautiful. Strong. Plus the canvas textures, the painter loves experimenting with, are almost real Nippon-ceramic.
Following the regular exhibitions of the painter one might conclude that the art of Alexander Nekrashevich is also unwinding to the consistent logic of the frieze, its rhythmic refrains and improvisations. In a series of works Handmade that was initiated in his previous exhibition, the "aviation" theme was presented in a different key and another technique. If his Guardian Angel with its dark steel-like, lead and pale indigo shades, with its complex linear graphics and deep shadows, is painted with conventional volume and lighting effects – as in the late mannerist gothic, the Handmade is really made by hand (every dab made with a finger), the imitation raster is seen through almost real image of the surface as the bright lining of a faded vest. The color – either the corner of an overheated slide, or a red Flemish paint over an unfinished XVII century painting.
Those two types of brushwork come together in the painting Hand-friend (2007, 200x150) – another version of 2003 canvas with the same title. In his "canine" series, as in several other works, the painter has utilized the once discovered image-module to create new visual constructs.
