solo show Игоря Литвинова

«EXISTENCE OF LIGHT»

06.09 — 18.10

Winzavod Contemporary Art Center, 4 Syromyatnichesky Lane, 1/8, building 9, entrance 22

"Igor Litvinov's work is at the cutting edge of the problem of overcoming the personal emotional element for the sake of entering the open space of absolute pictorial freedom. The method chosen by the artist is not just to show the obvious inferiority of "reality", but to contrast the absurdity of what is happening in the material world with the transcendental chaos in which absolute pain reigns. The fractured, distorted, deliberately caricatured human characters are presented in combination with tragic, anxiously expressive, extremely tense abstract background.
Yet this seemingly natural stylistic unity in Litvinov's canvases visibly transforms into a mysterious counterpoint, a polyphonic chord which paradoxically unites mercilessness and compassion, the bottomlessness of infernal spaces and the saving will to light, despair and hope, hell and purgatory. Capturing the drama (or comedy, in the Dantean interpretation) of unity and opposition to everything, the artist's optics nevertheless has the gift of penetrating into the abstract-concrete nature of space-time, including appeals to the oldest cultural codes and mythologemes. Igor Litvinov makes extensive use of the metaphysical plastic of the archaic as a means of purifying oneself from the dictates of linear logic and common sense in order to achieve the sacred ecstasy of clairvoyance, allowing the viewer to be led through the backside labyrinths of otherworldliness in order to prepare him for the cataclysms to come.
Igor Litvinov considers art and in particular the sacrament of picture-making to be an endless mystery without beginning or end, in which, once and for all, the artist breaks off all contact with anything and becomes wholly absorbed in the magical ritual as an irrational element of the unpredictable. A succession of seemingly wild, barbaric images born with his brush and temperament is shaped into a kind of pictorial action akin to shamanic rises and plunges into parallel worlds. As a result, the disturbing, stinging, impetuously aggressive, lethal strokes are transformed into an epic symphony of volcanic magma, the ideal building material of the end times.

Each canvas by Igor Litvinov is another radical experiment, a leap into the abyss, the madness of a brave professional who sacrifices his own spiritual-body existentialism, and, as an apotheosis, a furious dissection of reality designed to signify and confirm the artistic will of the author who in his own way manifests the eternal relevance of expressionism for the present and the future". 

Igor Dudinsky, art critic