Oleg Khvostov

The evolution of Oleg Khvostov’s art reads as the building of a personal, handmade Eden. For years the artist has been cultivating his garden, sacrificing everything accidental, fleeting and chaotic.

A Formula of Order: From Abstraction to Landscape
The framework of the artist’s plastic thinking lies in his early geometric abstraction. The pixel “Squares” (1997–1999) were no retreat into formalism. What we see is nothing less than a fundamental prime matter — the atoms from which Khvostov the painter would later unfold his landscapes. In seeking to isolate the basic unit of the painterly fabric, he performs an analytical dismantling of visible reality.

The modular grid of the “Squares” is a handmade simulation of digital noise, in which each square is autonomous yet strictly subordinated to a shared rhythmic field. Here the pixel is not the ephemeral module of a screen but a building block possessing weight and texture. The squares enlarge, forming L- and T-shaped configurations. In this optical play one discerns the constructive logic by which the artist would go on to build his personal, plastically uniform cosmos — one in which a tree, a cloud, a human face and the wall of a house are all made of the same substance.

Nature and the Geometry of Environments
In the 2010s the artist arrives at a totally smooth, “polymer” universe. In his landscapes, grass, hills and clouds turn into cones, spheres and cylinders. A soft, surgically precise gradation of color fills the flat geometric segments with inner volume and radiance. It is the gradient that creates the illusion of a polished space in which reason has triumphed over entropy through geometry, symmetry and color.

The Architectural Motif
Through the laconic images of houses with bright roofs and the blind voids of arches and windows, the history of art shows through in many of Khvostov’s paintings — from medieval towers to the metaphysical spaces of Giorgio de Chirico. Like the great Italian, Khvostov purges architecture of the utilitarian signs of life. His early experiments reveal a living laboratory of techniques: works from the same years display an inner tension between expressive painterly dynamism and a rigid geometric will. It is the latter that ultimately prevails.

The Face: Portraits and Self-Portraits
For Oleg Khvostov, the human face is a terrain no less complex than nature or the city. The artist breaks facial expression and individual features down into a series of conjoined planes and rounded volumes. Fleeting emotions acquire monumentality, turning the model into an archetype or a mannequin. Through tonal transitions he reassembles the face, rendering it akin to a sculptural relief or a mask. In the self-portraits this same strategy becomes a gesture of uncompromising self-scrutiny: the artist contemplates himself as part of his own ordered system.

A Hermetic Utopia
The new works depicting the lavender fields of Provence the artist himself sees in parallel with his 2014 solo exhibition “LavAndos,” in which his world had already acquired its contours and its palette, arriving at the totality of planetary design. Now Khvostov has brought the gradient to perfection: the transitions from deep shadow to light on the crowns of trees, the walls of villas and the folds of hills are executed with almost machine precision. This is painting that mimics the three-dimensional graphics of early video games while remaining handmade and monumental. The artist seems to have come within reach of his own ideal formula of order — a private paradise from which chaos, decay and cataclysm are excluded by the author’s crystal lattice, capable of reassembling any point on the globe, from the outskirts of St Petersburg to the fields of Provence, into a soothing, seamless, universally modeled architecture of the spirit.

Konstantin Zatsepin, scholarly consultant of the exhibition