Artchronika, No. 1, 2002.

Vladimir Salnikov. Oleg Nefedkin: Return as a Master

Oleg Nefedkin first studied book illustration with Boris Degtyaryov, the long-serving chief artist of the Detskaya Literatura (Children’s Literature) publishing house. He designed several books. He studied with Zinon, the famous icon painter, an archaist and innovator, and lived in a monastery. He worked in the studios of the Academy of Arts, became a commercially successful painter and travelled abroad. In other words, his professional career was made.

Then he gave up art and went into business. Eight years later he picked up his brush again, but in a quite new way. Where is the academic school of Degtyaryov, nineteenth-century realism, icon painting?! Where is what we call “the spiritual” — that euphemism for all that is timid and well-meaning? His new works look nothing like Vasiliev or Soroka — nor even like Klee and Miró, whom the artist loves so much. No tradition or school stands behind them. A rectangle of canvas, pigments — pure painting, purer even than that of the fanatics of modernist painting. Such art is indifferent to all formalism. It does not “work on the form” and does not “conceptualize”. Such turns in creative work, when the past burns away and everything converges on a single point — the one present — may be called a revelation. Here, nothingness reigns. This mode of painting has a great potential for openness. Each picture is the trace of an action, self-sufficient and self-contained. Craft — in which the master is strong, and which for centuries remained the basis of making art — is set aside.

That is how it looks from the author’s own point of view. But we cannot leave out another angle: creative work within the horizon of art history, which always implies sources. The artist, as a master who respects tradition, points to them himself in his paintings. They are in the works of Willem de Kooning and, in part, of Richard Diebenkorn. Abstractionism, ever young in the USA and a decisive influence on Europe, only fleetingly touched Russian unofficial art. Narrativity, imposed by Socialist Realism in its suppression of “the visual” that had dominated Russian culture before the Revolution, has prevailed in our contemporary art as well. Hence the lack of the formal experience that abstractionism gave the West, felt today throughout our visual culture — in art, architecture, design and cinema. In this context, Oleg Nefedkin’s initiative makes up for the shortage of “the visual” in Russian “high” culture and helps to restore the fundamental tradition as a whole.