Ilya Komov
Sunny Days

This is the first St. Petersburg show for the Moscow-based artist Ilya Komov. Its title borrowed from the eponymous song by the Soviet band Kino alludes to a feeling shared by most Russians: the long wait for the summer, that special time when life seems real and feels like a holiday. Ilya Komov is an artist of sunny days, a maven of strong stained-glass-like colours, and an upholder of French sensibilities in Russian art. Raised in a family of creative intellectuals, fluent in French, knowledgeable and enthusiastic about France’s southern towns, but infatuated with the Russian backwaters, Ilya is a true Russian European – of the kind, perhaps, that the Slavophiles used to be.

Of the relatively many artists from different countries inspired by the French artistic tradition dating from the turn of the 20th century and entranced by the explosive colours of Fauvism, few are truly original. Ilya Komov is among these few. He has a bold style that’s unmistakably his own, an original way of looking at things, an incredible colour vision, and a trademark way of combining the flat and the three-dimensional. His works are free of superfluous details, of the amusing trifles that would split the overall composition, and even of narrative itself: whatever goes on in his pictures is seen merely as an element of the endless cycle of events, a fixture of scenery. Here, composition approximates an ideogram, turning the painting into a chromatic, spatial, and semantic metaphor for the landscape. Komov’s brushwork is distinctive in its ‘complex simplicity’ and expressiveness. What he pursues is not so much a scenic painting motif as the meaningful harmony of the pictured view.

Ilya’s artworks are dominated by an inward event: material nature transforms into a poetic vision, a semblance of paradise on earth – a realm of calmness and peace where days are always sunny and festive. It seems that the artist has found such a place in the quaint old town of Romanov-Borisoglebsk (now Tutayev) by the Volga River. The artist’s preferred method is plein air painting, and most of the works featured in the exhibition are Tutayev landscapes: old churches, mansions, ships cruising along the Volga, houses, trees, and lonely human figures immersed in the quotidian cycle. Adding another visual dimension to the show are several portraits, views of France and Montenegro, and a Georgian still life, while the painting titled St. Petersburg. The Moyka acts as a tribute to the city where the exhibition takes place. Looking at these canvases, one feels a strong urge to be transported to wherever they were conceived, no matter Collioure or the Volga, as long as the day there is sunny.

Ilya Komov’s creative universe is a self-contained reality wherein landscape painting converges with soul-enriching experience and artistic instinct. In order to grasp it, one need only take a step forward, readjust one’s perception – and feel the effect of light, line, rhythm, vision, taking in the artist’s emotional message.