"Museum Exhibition" by Ivan Razumov is the closest possible approach to the technique of oil painting as it was at the end of the "Belle Époque." The artist breathes new life into canonical paintings that have lost their vitality and aura through repeated reproduction, carefully reassembling and meticulously rendering them.
One could say that he travels back to the future by way of forgetting the discoveries of Impressionism, the freshness of plein air, and complementary colors. Razumov works in layers, carefully balancing painted surfaces, drawing on the tradition of oil painting from before its end—a tradition he knows well from the Surikov Institute, and above all from his uncle's lessons, partly preserved in Soviet academic education. This tradition lies in the artist's family history, from which he begins his timeline. Ivan Razumov comes from a family of hereditary artists. His grandfather, Fyodor Konstantinov, was one of the most famous Soviet illustrators; his uncle, Vladimir Lykov, was a production designer for popular television plays and films of the 1970s–80s, including "The Adventures of Electronics" and "Wizards."
The frozen fairy tale of the history of academic art from the late 19th century breaks apart into puzzles that are reassembled both by the artist and by the viewer, who flawlessly recognizes the compositional matrices. The impossibility of creating a masterpiece as it was understood at the end of the previous century becomes for the artist a reason for resuscitation—literally, a return of the soul to that painting which reigned on the eve of monumental changes, embodying the naive charm of progress, the hope for prosperity, and faith in history, whether global or personal.
The ability to tell stories, dethroned from the painting's pedestal to the pages of comics in the 20th century, is a challenge for Razumov, in which the pictorial language—whether of Isaac Levitan, Valentin Serov, Vasily Surikov, Ilya Repin, or even Fyodor Reshetnikov—coexists in a collage-like combination of technique and subject matter.
Ivan Razumov's imaginary museum combines different paintings into one. Some might call this metonymy, others schizophrenia. Lenin from one painting by Isaak Brodsky moves into another from the same artist's "Leniniana." Surikov's Suvorov, with his soldiers rapidly descending the icy slopes of the Alps, hovers above the pictorial luxury of Repin's underwater kingdom, which lulled Sadko to sleep. The knight from Viktor Vasnetsov's "Knight at the Crossroads" leaves his painting to become a spectator of the choice he is about to make; Ivan Tsarevich with the Firebird is catapulted from Vasnetsov's "Magic Carpet." Ivan the Terrible and his son evaporate from the bloody Repin interior of the crime scene, leaving only an empty space. Levitan, captured by Serov, gazes melancholically from the clouds, suspended "Above Eternal Peace." The artist—a creator on the eve of an era of change, finding himself at Belshazzar's feast—has his brush inscribe the prophecy that everything will be "numbered, weighed, and divided."
OLESYA TURKINA, VIKTOR MAZIN
