Oleg Vasiliev, b.1931

The links between graphic and fine art in the post war period were particularly close in Russia.  Following the path of Ilya Kabakov, Oleg Vasiliev initially trained as a book designer at the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow.  In the 1960s he collaborated with fellow artist Eric Bulatov and they developed a new style of painting using photorealism combined with other pictorial elements such as text, a radical approach at the time.

Leading Soviet graphic artist Vladimir Favorsky (1886-1964) was a major influence on Vasiliev’s work.  Favorsky emphasised the constructive qualities of image-making, understanding painting as a rhythmic organisation of space swirling about time.  Such abstract aesthetic thought was alien to mainstream Soviet Realism and demonstrates the liberties afforded graphic designers during this period.  With a preoccupation for the structural qualities of a composition, these aesthetics also find their origin in Russian Constructivism of the 1920s.

In Landscape and Space photorealism is not used as a means to an end.  It serves to create a seemingly credible or ‘real’ landscape, which the artist then typically subverts by the addition of surprising motifs.  Here, this is in the form of a decorative spectral light effect emanating from the sky and resonating with the surrounding landscape.  We are witnesses to a supernatural phenomenon orchestrated by the artist as metaphysician.

Vasiliev’s recurring preoccupation with light and shade in his oeuvre also points to a psychological dimension, with light symbolising consciousness and dark, the subconscious.  Elements of German Romanticism influence his thought.  He searches for answers in an unfathomable world, posing questions without obvious answers and leaving the viewer feeling nonplussed, a hallmark of Postmodernist art of which the offered lot can be considered an example.