Живописцы современной России: поиск меры человеческого в искусстве

Abstract

The subject of this study is the plastic and semantic searches of modern painters which are marked by reflection on the measure of the human in art and in life. The author believes that it is not worth revealing a single creative style vector in our contemporaries. The majority of creative practices inherit the most significant experiences of modernism: expressionism, cubism, abstraction, and suprematism. The creative method that appears to be most popular is the one in which the artist does not break with figurativeness, but significantly deforms it, working on the border of objectivity and abstraction. People’s disappointment in any socio-philosophical theories of the last century has produced the risk of a semantic dead end in goal-setting and motivation of their consciousness and behaviour. In this situation, artists, in particular painters, offer their research and answers. The paradoxical thing is that by refracting sad, oppressive and even harshly dramatic situations in art, painting demonstrates the effect of a “transformed feeling”: it conveys to the audience a sense of belonging, and thereby alleviates their own internal states. The article analyses the work of painters Viktor Kalinin, Natalia Nesterova, Larisa Naumova, Nikolai Rybakov, and Vasily Shulzhenko.