Oleg Khvostov

This is the first Oleg Khvostov’s exhibition in four years which features his new artworks, and only a few of them have been selected: a huge, three-meter-long landscape; the artist’s first-ever triple tondo which is also a landscape; and, finally, a self-portrait in the center of the exposition. Khvostov the expositionist is as laconic as Khvostov the painter. His selective gaze, turning to his own artistic practice of the last decade, like a filter, crystallizes it into the most important and personal genre forms for him.

The optics through which the artist looks at the world and himself has two key properties. First, it reduces the complex, composite visual layers contained within the centuries-old context of art history to simple yet essential and homogenous form- patterns. Their polished smoothness and roundness materializes the attitude towards reality as the primary “clay” from which the artist sculpts his universe. In Khvostov’s new works, the nature of the imagery itself begins to impact the form of its physical medium, hence his newly acquired affinity for rotund canvases, which appear as bubbles encasing fragments of the world.

The other quality of Khvostov’s optics is seriality. His images are not limited to individual works, instead they are repeated, generated by a flow in which the author is continuously searching and honing his own technique. The model of the world as a whole that they produce is familiar to the audience from Khvostov’s earlier exhibitions — a world of contrasted, gradient color, geometrically calibrated composition, and homogenous backgrounds. And at the same time, viewers are faced with rich sensuality, seductiveness of the images within the context of general coldness, “digitality” of the artist’s palette. This is still obviously a soft, elastic world that does not care about external interventions. The large scale of the paintings reveals the artist’s movement towards greater monumentality.

The artist’s own hair, which he incorporates into his self-portrait, seems to be the sole unstructured aspect of real life. This method, which has been used by the artist repeatedly, recalls holy relics or mummification, the idea of imperishability. Using reproducible biological material, the artist is present in his work directly, as a body, while at the same time he moderates the chaos of the hair with an adhesive substance, embedding its unstable texture into his painterly formula of order based on softness.

Konstantin Zatsepin