Exhibition > Past > SEB Gallery

SEB Gallery 04.11.2009-16.12.2009

Episodes

An exhibition of its own could be put together from the headings of exhibitions. They would constitute a series of messages through which the artists have wished to bring their visual work into verbal space, thereby explaining the contents of all that unexplainable that only the eye can capture to the full.

In this example the heading in SEB Gallery this time is “Episodes” – a collective name which encompasses a number of watercolours and drawings from the artist Slava Semerikov. It’s a project that is actually explained through two displays as Slava Semerikov opens an exhibition on the same subject also in SED ARTE Gallery (Baltic Hotel Vana Viru). Let’s stay at one of them yet get the idea of what’s in the artist’s mind throughout the two as both are very much worth visiting.

In SEB Gallery the works completed in 2000–2009 are represented, the main part of which consists of nude drawings in traditional pencil technique and a series of portraits in watercolour-mixed technique. His favourite subjects – myths and reality, fantasy and eroticism – are treated with the fine sense of aestheticism characteristic of Semerikov. Clear images and vague links. When watching the pictures we can’t separate them from the exhibition as a whole although each of them carries its own mood. When walking among the pictures (and not just in a hurry and once) we actually see not so much an individual thought but an entire development of a subject. Episodes that transform from a moment where someone’s tongue is shockingly reaching for a knife’s blade to a moment where a tree’s branch is lying on the ground like a charming nude. Everything is in everything. Moment in a moment and similar in different.

According to the artist his credo is to aestheticize the picture’s space to the maximum. „Details decide everything. And if you don’t find the so-called “ultimate idea” in the picture – it means that you have understood everything correctly,” he says. Here let’s talk about Slava Semerikov’s drawing talent that makes us ask how have these pictures been made, how has realism been captured in such detail that there’s nothing to criticize yet that realism is far from the painstaking and dry effort aimed only at finishing the details. The artist commands his hand well and doesn’t have to struggle to achieve the truthfulness of details, the right proportions or convincingness of an eye blink. It is the thought, the idea that prevails here, the moment captured at that instant as an episode, a frame that caught your eye and that the hand has longed to put on paper to preserve.

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