An artist from Belarus showed Moscow an illusory support

Exhibition of Yevgeny Shadko opened in Fine Art Gallery

The name of the exhibition “I am your support” at first glance contradicts the content of the project. The paintings by the artist from Minsk Yevgeny Shadko presented in the Fine Art Gallery resemble a dream, a mirage, an illusion, that is, they speak of fragility, fragility and vulnerability. However, this impression is also an illusion. Still, there is support in the touching picturesque series, where the line between reality and imagination is blurred. The MK reviewer found it in the author’s own self.

Yevgeny Shadko graduated from the Glebov Minsk Art College, and why the Copernicus University in Polish Torun. Taking his first steps in art, he found his artistic language, which is distinguished by the ease of expressive means. Relaxed poses of heroes, pastel shades, a subtle sense of the world, which the author seems to collect from fragments on canvases, painted with soft but large strokes. However, behind this lightness there is depth: the topics that the artist takes on cannot be called simple.

In his native Belarus, his conceptual language on the verge of psychoanalysis is now difficult to perceive. According to Marina Obraztsova, the founder of the Fine Art gallery, who recently visited Minsk, museums there show more and more understandable, “direct” subjects – landscapes and still lifes. And there are simply no private galleries. Therefore, Evgeny Shadko presents his new series in Moscow.

At the exhibition, the viewer finds himself surrounded by young people, as if emerging from a picturesque mirage. Many heroes of works in the truest sense of the word seek and find support. Here is a diptych: on the left, a young man appears in the branches of a white tree, who seems to be either hugged or pierced through the branches, and in the picture on the right, a girl is holding on to the trunk of the same tree, furtively looking at us from behind her own shoulder. Several paintings show couples engaged in the so-called “confidence game”: one falls backwards on the other, and the one behind catches a partner in flight. The artist depicts the moment when one caught the other, that is, found support. Several paintings depict young people leaning on horses that resemble that ghostly mare that Yuri Norshtein painted in The Hedgehog in the Fog: these, too, are like from a fairy tale and seem to be drowning in the fog. But still, more at the exhibition of paintings, where the characters are left alone – alone with themselves.

The faces of the characters combine calm and tension. Their features seem to be a little erased, universally beautiful or individual due to colorful accents in the form of bright spots that appear under the eyes or on the cheeks. It seems that reality depersonalizes them, and imagination adds color. Before us is a portrait of quiet anxiety – the author’s own “I”, expressed in a multitude of faces in search of support, which is eventually found in oneself – in that very balance between reality and dream, which only you yourself can determine.

“We have before us the moment of fixing our own “I,” Marina Obraztsova talks about the work of Yevgeny Shadko. – We are in a state of sleep, illusions, between the past or the future, trying to determine the present. It seems to me that Zhenya is looking for support primarily in himself, like every conscious person. Mindfulness is the ability to take responsibility for yourself and understand that for your actions you are primarily responsible to yourself, and not to God, society or anyone else. Zhenya works great with light, he has such a sad-light art – thoughtful. I would call it post-post-impressionism.