Guennadi Vassilkov

Guennadi VASSILKOV was born in 1947 in Ukraine. He trained between 1962 and 1973. He studied at the Vijnitsy Art School, the Kharkov School of Arts and Industry and the Tbilisi Academy of Fine Arts. Until 1980 he specialized in design at the Experimental Design and Architecture Studio in Senej (Moscow). He seeks to reconcile all these artistic trends in his work: design, painting and theater. Since 1989, he has lived in France. He now divides his time between the south of France and Morocco. Heir to Malévich, Kandinsky, old and new Russia, Guennadi Vassilkov constructs his work between dog and wolf, between night and early morning, like a long poem where the light of the North and the light of the South emerge in turn. Series, I would rather say suites, because we enter into his paintings as into music. We can hear Bach's Invisible Barriers or Mikoel Galasso's violin, so much does some paintings show a joy, that of rising life, with tears of fleeting emotions in the background, of memories extracted from his individual history. I see there the return of an old snow from which emerge the signs of a vivid, acute memory. The writing, all in scratches, violin strings, barbed wire, tends towards understatement. Which is, as we know, the art of expressing the most while saying the least. Like Bach's music, the canvases are both very structured and the quintessence of emotion escapes. In the black series, the painter reveals his taste for architecture, the sculpture of space. The sign becomes volume, the shade color, the blue, the red explode in bouquet. And in the background the letter withdraws into the white. In the journey in the studio, the gray-blue series like the gray series, intervene like a zone of fragile turbulence, where the dreamlike and fragile part of the painter comes in counterpoint to the black series. We look at it as a confidence. The grayish white background swept by touches of gray, blue, points of red, green is an enchantment in the first sense. The color speaks of rebirth, of hope, of the freshness of feelings. The notations remain allusive, they are light brushstrokes, lines whose origin and destination remain impenetrable. Guennadi Vassilkov's vocabulary has the capacity to draw up a state of the moods of the world, of those of the artist, according to flashes of light that spring up in the secrecy of the tête-à-tête between the canvas and the artist. Confidences never supported. The artist speaks of himself, of course, but also of painting, of his ability to reveal the hidden face of beings and the world, without pathos, without any noise other than that of the silence of bluish whites, of the thunder of blacks, of the crystalline laughter of yellow and pink As in the evolution of a storm, the painter follows the course of his research, questioning the states of his soul, such as the capacity of painting to produce meaning, to bring together in the language of colors and shapes, perceptions of the world and personal feelings. The picture emerging from this incessant coming and going between oneself and the materials available, a palette of colors, the hand that traces and the beats of emotion carrying an interior river rich in moments of a traveller's life with luggage, discreet, secret, intense. Nicole de Pontcharra Puygiron 2010