FEDOR ALEXEEV
Sant-PETERSBURG
PAINTING
Fedor Alekseev was born in Leningrad on September 8, 1952 in the family of actors. When at school he attended a historical study group at the Hermitage. After military service when he was studying at the Moscow Technological Institute he got interested in fine arts. For several years he studied the basic skills of painting in the studio of Georgy Mudryonov. In 1975 he started studying methods and techniques of painting at the Arts College named after Mukhina and the Academy of Fine Arts. All in all he devoted to his studies 13 years. After a long period of crisis (in 1988 - 1989) he began to set his own system in painting. Fedor Alekseev is a member of Painters' Association of Russia. Since 1989 he has been participating in group exhibitions
PERSONAL EXHIBITIONS
1992 The "Borey" Gallery, St. Petersburg
1994 The Commandant House of Peter-and-Paul Fortress, St. Petersburg
1999 Painters' Association of Russia, St. Petersburg
2000 The "Borey" Gallery, St. Petersburg
2002 The "Art-Kollegiya" Gallery, St. Petersburg
When one sees the works of an unfamiliar painter, an attempt is made to find their historical and cultural background. As soon as they are found the painter is placed to some category of classification and since then everything becomes clear about him. As far as Fedor Alekseev is concerned it is not that simple. He paints exclusively St. Petersburg scenery. But no painter since the foundation of St. Petersburg in 1703 can be named his progenitor or forerunner. St. Petersburg of Alekseev is far from being similar to any traditions in the city iconography.
Alekseev's painting is deliberately flat. He transfers into plane the three dimensions of St. Petersburg landscape using the global architectural space. Whereas Kandinsky avoids clear shape by using colours to make landscape forms look muffled, Alekseev turns everything into the simplest geometrical planes (plain surfaces), the figures of Malevich. But if for Malevich the sought figures were the semantic aim of his work, Alekseev uses them as tools for constructing a concrete St. Petersburg landscape on the canvas surface. Actually, he is trying to organize the geometry of space as utmostly united gestalts and patterns. And transition of the three dimensions to the plane depends not on the particular features of the real landscape but on the process of animalization which is used during the work.
Fedor begins work on any picture with a routine and detailed sketch from scape. Sometimes several drawings of this kind are made to one picture. In the process of the preliminary work on nature he penetrates into the image and drawing becomes an inspiring process. Creating composition, defining the form and deciding on the texture is formation of the framework and gradual addition of embodiment to it.
When the idea of the scape is ripe and reaches the critical point he goes on to work on the nature sketches: to remove unnecessary details, to make compositional generalizations, to get rid of the three dimensions, to make prominent compositional blocks and to saturate them with texture. On this stage crystallization of the idea takes place which is shown through preliminary decision on the color, shades and choice of composition of colours.
The rest of the work is done on canvas. Fedor transfers onto the canvas not the final drawing itself, but its idea and spiritual substance that was separated during the work. The mechanism of transition is irrational. It may be substantial difference of the compositional structure on the canvas and the final one. Partly it is also due to the fact that creating composition on the canvas is made with coloured planes on the spot without any preliminary preparation and colors follow their own laws.
For Fedor Alekseev "colour is a form, but a form in connection with another form which is colour". Preliminary colour composition is the basis to which a colour embodiment is repeatedly added. Each added colour interacts with the previous one. "I don't choose colours; I just test their behavior to each other. I do my best to let colours have self-expression". Even a minor change of brightness or tone changes the way other colours in the composition are taken. The main thing is to find such a correlation of colours in the composition which will give each separate colour its own part in the composition ensemble.
As a result of this multiple staged and archaic technology - work on every single composition takes several years - the final canvas comes out really grand, academic in its essence, monumental in its form and colour. In each of these aspects works of Fedor Alekseev represent an apparent contradiction to the existing modern art. His works oppose regular and consistent academic work to unserious, playful and ironic; a work of art to a gesture; an artistic text to a context.
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