Victor Nekrasov. Infinite Course of Events

Victor Nekrasov’s art is closely linked to his pedagogical career: his impressive track record includes 40 years of teaching and being at the helm of an art school in the small town of Pikalyovo, Leningrad Oblast. The company of his students and remoteness from the motley metropolitan art scene allow the artist to keep his mind focused on searching for the answers to the questions raised by the early-20th-century art education innovators. Nekrasov creates as if neither conceptual art nor socially engaged actionism have ever existed. He is enthralled by the harmony of proportions and convinced that geometry can grant the viewer a kind of fundamental knowledge about the world.

The artist’s paintings are far removed from Malevich’s Black Square, and yet it was exactly this masterpiece that inspired the series of works showcased in this exhibition. Using the traditional painterly tools, Nekrasov constructs his ideal imaginary worlds. He turns the static image enclosed in a square into a dynamic vision that reveals to the viewer here a bottomless portal, there a face of an Ancient Egyptian deity: this amalgamation of mysticism and geometry makes the artist’s oeuvre particularly captivating. It blends the archaic with the 21st-century rationalism, while the decorative potential of these paintings evokes Art Deco, the never-fading artistic style which has remained en vogue for several recent decades.