 Oleg Vassiliev - recent works The American art critic Clement Greenberg once wrote of the American painter Edward Hopper that if he had been a better painter he might not have been so good an artist. What, one wonders, might he have made of Oleg Vassiliev? Vassiliev is the painter Hopper could never have been. His range is a testament to his virtuosity, from Abstraction to Photorealism, from Expressionism to Luminism, from political commentary to lyrical reverie. Like Hopper, however, Oleg Vassiliev is the artist he is because of the directness with which he communicates ineffable emotions. Vassiliev is a poet of desolation. His paintings transcend their means. They enact in the viewer small dramas of memory, impossibility, and loss. As with Hopper, their subject is the interior landscape and the ways in which emotion is projected on the place in which one finds oneself. A house becomes isolated in close detail and infinite space; an interior is bleached in unforgiving light. The difference is that Hopper was a painter of the mid century West, where memory seemed reliable, lives stable, and place was the ground beneath one's feet. Vassiliev is a painter of the late twentieth century diaspora and the cusp of the millennium. His paintings are a metaphor for his times. His place has always been a precarious one, at the edge. (Textauszug: Amei Wallach) Ausstellungsdauer: 18.11. - 23.12.2000 Oeffnungszeiten: Mi - Fr 14 - 18.30 Uhr, Sa 12 - 16 Uhr Galerie Andy Jllien Rämistrasse 18 8001 Zürich Telefon 01 252 95 00 Fax 01 252 95 00 |
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