International Artists Promotion Group

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In the modern era of polystylism in art, it is very difficult to not get lost and actually become a prominent figure with your own artistic world, one which is interesting for lovers of fine art. Learning from the experience of predecessors and mastering the grammar of a particular painting style does not guarantee success. This can only be the foundation. Pushing from it, building your own visual row, your own world of feelings, everyone has to go his own way, trusting intuition and striving hard for a self-sufficient sense of identity. Some painters follow the path of observation and reflecting upon the real world, and others through meditation and transformation of natural forms.

     An artist who seeks his own intonation in the synthesis of the concrete and the imagined, is Andrew Shustov. His search for a new visual language, is an exploration into the color possibilities of painting. This search relies on the French school of painting of the late 19th – early 20th centuries, and their followers on Russian soil. This is possibly where the artist’s interest towards still life come from. The plotless painting, like a fragment of the reflection of the real world, becoming more popular among artists at the beginning of the 20th century, opens great possibilities of interpreting nature. Moving the object as close as possible, focusing on its integrity and materiality, the artist puts it on the canvas close-up, separating it from the surrounding reality. The two-dimensional space of the canvas thus becomes a cluster of artistic matter, a kind of decorative element, consisting of the living rhythm of color patches (“Onion”, “Tea”).

     Landscape, once playing a minor role, has become a separate genre since the 17th century. Its rise came into the 19th century. At this time, it rose to the importance of an “eternal theme.” In modern art, its position remains unchanged. A huge variety of existing forms of the material world, movement, and internal connections of a single natural matrix are the creative impulse for the individual reading of the topic. In this traditional genre, many contemporary artists continue to work productively, including Andrew Shustov who prefers the urban landscape. The effect of his paintings are based mainly on the contrast between a few key local areas of color and additional harmonic color series. Such works are fragments of the real world, transformed by the author’s imagination into a planar-decorative composition, with a strong color intensity and dynamic rhythms, which has lots of sunlight. In the urban landscape, the architecture itself, with its geometric shapes having clear contours, suggests a corresponding decision – the organization of space within the composition in the style of stained glass art with a strong facet of colorful spots (“Last Year’s Sun”, “Bay”, “Girona”,  “Heat”).

     The art of Andrew Shustov is also attractive due to the fact that he is a color-minded artist. Every element of his paintings is not accidental, but occurs according to the logic of a special reflection of reality, both the present one, and the one that is born within him. Figurative paintings are the fruit of the painter’s imagination, of his artistic fantasies coupled with the clear presence of irony and a tendency for oxymoron (“Antediluvian Childhood”). The author’s confident tone captivates the viewer and easily leads to the world invented by the artist. This world is populated by touching, funny, naive and charming characters, in some ways similar to us, made specifically with simplified forms – bearded men, women, centaurs, creatures with wings, as well as birds and fish … The eccentric figures are static images, and their condition and mood is determined by the gesture, posture, the turning of the head (“Bathing in the hole”, “Rubicon”).

     The core of his painting is color. Here is what the artist says about this: “The painting is a spot. The painting is a repository of large patches of color, sometimes breaking up into a mosaic, and other times gathering from the pieces of a stained glass window. The spots have a strict hierarchy. The main color of the fragment is surrounded by supporting, reinforcing, sagging, blurry boundaries, that do not let it break into a scream. Color, like the pianist in a silent movie, sculpts the emotional content of a painting. The plot is often just an excuse, subtitles, or tickers, which are sometimes unread …”

     There is another important element in his works – the horizon, as a spatial coordinate. “The horizon, which is linearly hard and clear, is one of the main characters in my paintings. The horizon of the table, the horizon of the room, the horizon of the landscape, low or high, defines the boundaries of the characters’ actions.” The location of this line can change the author’s tone to influence the emotional timbre of the sound of the canvas.

    Invented by the artist, the “color world, whose walls are no thicker than a primed canvas” is warm, clear, fragile and enigmatic. Meeting with its inhabitants is fascinating. Their actions, though strange at first glance, may cause a smile, compassion, and may give food for thought and open within them new hidden meanings, in tune with our times. Sometimes the very name of the painting pushes us towards this (“Oknograf”, “Green Tree”). Each painting of Andrew Shustov is a small fragment of his special artistic feeling, absorbing the entire kaleidoscope of life experience, reasoning, imagination and fantasy, imprinted in a variety of fleeting forms and views. Together, they form a picturesque artist’s universe. And each of them, “continues until the corner of the canvas receives the signature of someone who is so similar to brightly dressed men with beards.”

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“Onion”  Oil on Canvas. (50 x 80 cm)

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Catherine Costes, columnist of the “Luxe Immo” magazine.

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