CALA FETOVAIA

Alexey Smirnov, Russia

SAVART Everybody can become a painter, it’s given to everybody but far not everyone wishes it! Smirnov Alexey SMIRNOV ALEXEY VALENTINOVICH (SAVART) Alexey Smirnov is a contemporary, distinctive artist working at junction of fine art with its inherent esthetics and contemporary art with its intentional “madness”, challenge and hidden meaning. His pictures astonish with their depth, volume and intensity. Alexey Valentinovich Smirnov was born in 1958 in Leningrad in an ordinary Soviet family. Alexey Smirnov’s pace of life, as the fates of the millions of our compatriots, was composed of traditional for the Soviet society stages: kindergarten, school, institute, army, family and work. He never managed to obtain professional art education but his love to art was so immense that for the long years he had had the feeling that his real calling was to paint pictures. Having no diploma of a school of art but possessing a native talent, Alexey Smirnov in his native city of Leningrad, in the atmosphere of creativity and art, has formed not only as a remarkable man of marked individuality but as a professional painter having his own individual personality of a cher maitre. For many years the painter have been trying to find himself. Never copying any of his colleagues-artists he refined his mastership, searched for his own artistic language. Soon these endeavours began to produce results – Alexey Valentinovich formed his original bright and remarkable volume technique of painting works of art. The creative work of Alexey Smirnov differs with his enhanced sensitive perception of life, search of new means of expression consonant with modern times. The principal theme of Alexey Smirnov’s art is modernity. In his works the perception of environment loses its single-valuedness. Almost each painting makes the viewer to contemplate it long while, provoking a number of associations and deliberations. In his works one can often observe the collision of the mundane and the fantastic, interlacing of lyric and grotesque, romance and irony. The characteristic feature of the author’s plastic language is a sharp feel of colouring, expression and fascination with texture, all of it allowing realize both formal decorative and conceptual psychologic tasks. Through the half-opened door of his art the author invites the viewer to make a step into the unknown, where vibrations of picturesque lines, gorgeous forms and fantastic constructions are filled with sense and obtain their ethereal tangibility, transform into structures of the World around us. The World consisting not of things and subjects but of essences, powers and energies. The play of lines of the picture, surfaces of colour and space in the artist’s compositions form metaphorical image of beingness, put in motion the viewer’s intellect, encouraging him for self-perfection and finding knowledge of eternal secrets of the universe. The painter defines the essence of his creative work as follows: “I will never stop admiring the world around me and I wish to share this with everyone. I will be happy, if my pictures and images on them make the viewer empathic: will be interesting for him, consonant with his own feelings and thoughts, or contrarily, will help to see and feel something very important for him but in a whole new way!” The creative work of Alexey Valentinovich Smirnov is not just bright and deep images of his works but the example of the way for implementation of own ideas, having no fear of searching own path and follow the dream in any age. The works of Alexey Smirnov can be found in the private collections in Russia, Finland, Sweden, France, Italy, Canada and China, in renowned galleries of Saint Petersburg and the Museum of Modern Art ERARTA.