Galerie de Buci continues to showcase new talent: Russian artist in exile in France Ivan Afonskiy joins the Gallery and presents some of his recent works in the virtual exhibition My Life in Paris. With My Life in Paris, Ivan Afonskiy demonstrates his talent for painting contemporary life in the most academic traditions. His realism, a legacy of a long line of Russian and Soviet painters, is a kind of staging of everyday objects, of his life, of the simple and usual things that surround us. And the people the artist meets once, like passers-by in the street, or whom he sees every day, like his wife. As he explains: “I paint what surrounds me and everything that constitutes an important part of my life. I almost always turn to portraiture. I consider faces and images as an important reflection of contemporary reality. I like to explore details, to treat nature with care and attention, while leaving only the most expressive.” » Born in 1993 in Moscow in the family of painters, it was his father who gave him his first drawing lessons and his mother was his high school teacher. Just like his sisters and brother, he successfully graduated from the Sourikov Academy of Painting in 2017, he already had a rich history of exhibitions and participation in international projects in Russia, the United States, France, Turkey, Serbia, Georgia or the Netherlands. Since the beginning of the war between Russia and Ukraine he lives and works in France. The exhibition My life in Paris is a work of decoding the new life of the artist where everything is to be discovered, to be known or recognized, to find its references. And Ivan keeps it simple: he documents his daily life: a table in the morning after an evening with friends, chairs in front of the window, friends on the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin, a view of the Tuileries Garden, even the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop. The painter takes us through his Paris, shares with us his daily life, introduces us to new faces. The series of 4 watercolors with portraits immerses us in a world of people who seem indifferent but are on the lookout for what could happen: a kind of fresco of people's lives in a contemporary megacity. The artist's eye almost lays them bare, with long necks and misty eyes, mouths contorted in a kind of polite half-smile. Except when it is necessary to assert one's rights, one's remarks, we almost hear the cry of a lady or the whisper of a boy. They are all strangers to the painter, they speak the language he does not yet master, Ivan tries to understand them by drawing them, as if he wanted to grasp their thoughts or their destinies. And, who knows, maybe in a future series we will find the artist among these faces? In any case, Ivan Afonskiy's chronicle continues to tell us about his life. His life in Paris.
Read more
