BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

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Published: June 15 2005 03:00

From Belarus: talent in spades

Last updated: June 15 2005 03:00

Only a naive, sincere country new to the Biennale, or a giant sophisticate such as the US, dares to show paintings at a Biennale in 2005, which is what makes the first Belarussian pavilion in Venice such a triumph.

Belarus, the last communist dictatorship in Europe, has only ever produced one artist of international note - Marc Chagall - and its art world remains utterly unknown beyond its own borders.

Yet the painters on display in the large gallery above a bookshop just behind St Mark's Square - no room at the inns of the Giardini or Arsenale for unfashionable eastern newcomers such as Belarus - have in spades what is missing from almost every knowing minor national pavilion of 2005: original vision, independent spirit, something to say, and an engagement with tradition.

The show opens not with paintings but with Vladimir Tsesler's and Sergei Voichenko's hilarious installation "Dinosaur's Eggs", 12 enormous eggs on bright red plinths paying tribute to the great artistic figures - now dinosaurs? - of the past century: a black velvet one called Malevich ("Black Square"), white enamel for Duchamp (the urinal), kitsch gold for the surrealist Dali, iron bound with bolts for the imprisoned, silenced Russian poet Mayakovsky, mahogany geometric shapes slotted together for the cubist Picasso, an elongated egg in luscious marble for Modigliani.

Contrasting textures, too, are what makes the selection of paintings by nine artists so vivid.

Valerij Shkarubo paints monumental forests in a hyperrealistic style that borders on abstraction yet also recalls Russia's iconic 19th-century landscapist Ivan Shishkin, the "bookkeeper of leaves".

Andrei Zadorine's figure and group studies with a highly varnished finish, such as "Class of 1912", are dense, luminous works that play on a variety of sources, from sepia photographs to surrealism and Flemish 17th-century portraiture, questioning the nature and possibilities of paint itself, while Igor Tishkin's close-up full-frontal portraits in strong colour tones, as in "The Nanny's Wish", are expressionist howls.

Ruslan Vashkevich parodies Soviet realism, drenching grey mock-photographs of idealised Russian youth in sharp, unsubtle reds and greens - the colours of the Belarussian flag - in the pungent "Colourblind Triptych".

Tsesler and Voichenko's semi-abstract "Spiral" has a Byzantine ornamentation, and a metallic gold surface that complements the sensuous gold wash flooding Natalya Zaloznaya's light, lyrical abstractions, with their fading calligraphic inscriptions, such as "Usual Thought".

These are paintings that talk to each other and to tradition. Perhaps it is that Belarus's cultural and political isolation has thrown these artists back on a classical heritage while urging highly personal modes of expression.

Source:

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/e436f808-dd3a-11d9-b590-00000e2511c8.html