As Milan Kundera, a famous culture theorist wrote: “…painting discovered the background in the Renaissance, along with the perspective that divides the picture, separating things that are foremost from those which are deep in the back. From this rose up a specific issue of the form; for example, a portrait: face attracts more attention than the body, and much more than the drapery deep in the back. It is quite normal, that’s exactly how we see the world around us, but what is normal in ordinary life may still fail to meet the formal requirements of art, so the only thing to do was to smooth, mitigate, restore the equilibrium between parts perturbed in the picture, the preferred parts and all the rest, a priori considered less important”. But the amazing thing is that this conclusion of the scientist always so very precise in wording seems to apply to Leonid Petrushin’s art only indirectly if at all – it must be some exception. At the very least with his “NU” Symphony and the cycle of portraits that had been created by him in more than thirty years, it is hard enough to decide whether it is the body or the face that “attracts the artist’s attention” more.
But if we take into account the period of time when the works under consideration were created, we will see that fifty compositions of nude models treated by Petrushin as an integral whole, had been created within single creative process, that had a beginning and the end, and happened during one year, 2005. We can only admire the capability and the ardent enthusiasm of the artist. Meanwhile the portraits presented in the catalogue had covered the stretch of, as it has already been mentioned, of a somewhat long period of time, from 1977 to 2006. And, what is most interesting, these portraits fall into two radically different groups corresponding to two different historical epochs: it is the black-and-white pencil drawings of the Soviet times, and the pastel painting of the post-Perestroyka Russia. Here some additional characterizing suggests itself.
At the time when they were created these black-and-white portraits looked quite on the level, and provoked no dubious emotions. At that time that kind of drawing was an accepted thing. But today, after the lapse of so many years, this black-and-white world, especially when compared with the sunny and colorful pastels, is perceived as a metaphor of some spiritual depression, of some constraint. Naturally, Petrushin never consciously planned to instill into the works of that period any such meaning. Still, being an artist by the fates designation, he as a creative man has always been responsive to rumbles and rustles of the epoch, and this showed up years later.
As to Petrushin being a consummate draughtsman, one can but acknowledge it. His pencil portraits are marked by extreme diversity of the techniques employed, and he demonstrates all capacities of each to the full. It is precise, clear, elaborated drawing, whether done in outlines or by means of plastic modeling with tonal effects and highlights and original hatch-work. The works are characterized by a most subtle capturing the physiognomic peculiarities of the models, it is often done with acute emphasis and has some intrinsic fragility, the latter being particularly typical for Petrushin. Let us stress the key feature of his art: neither landscape, nor still life, but human being in all its guises is the obsessive objective of his art.
Pencil portraits by Leonid Petrushin are academic kind of art, in the best sense of the term, one may even consider them classical works of the time. They ring with the piercing intonations of the epoch, direct observation is perceived in them as extension of the past into the present. Petrushin’s imagery system is simple, and devoid of ambiguity. The author doesn’t create any false story-telling aspects, his models honestly pose as models, which is registered in a slightly strained face expressions. This human behavior similarity module gives to the models the salience of the epoch symbols.
Everything the artist knows about the world he knows from his own perspective and through his own experience. Without these two constituents all the symbols created by the author would have been void. Petrushin’s experience as of a draughtsman is enormous: going by subway he has made about six thousand sketches of his fellow-passengers. This achievement not only is worth to be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records, but also witnesses to the absolute freedom in his comprehending human being artistically. Instead of reality of the mechanically reproduced image of the surrounding world the artist, with grudging, subtle, hardly noticeable, elegant to perfection means shows social position of the person, reality of his or her inner world, immensely complicated and contradictory. In most Petrushin’s compositions prevails neutral dark background. As to the “image of the surrounding world” it is measured out grudgingly, and is marked most laconically (a tractor hidden in the background in the “Tractor operator” (1985), an air-field “sausage”, wind indicator in the “Post carrier of Purneme” (1985), and most mysterious railway background in the portrait “Nastya” (1986) railways being usually associated with unsettled state and disorderly life in general, an old-fashioned Romanesque window in the portrait “Nadya” (1983), that reminds us of the Russian Silver Age architecture, and others.)
If when considering Soviet period portraits one could say about Petrushin that he is an artist leaning to analysis and capable of reconstructing outlines of his own mental processes, in his pastels of the later time, in the very type of his painting he to a certain degree displays his taste for unconscious, spontaneous gestures. Almost puritanical severity of his “black-and-white” period turns into riotous color element. The artist uses the whole spectrum of the palette, but there is nothing garish in his works. Mosaics of the additional color touches, applied with great vigor (this technique, presumably, does not allow prolonged reflections with brush in hand) establish in the works of since 2002 harmonious unanimity, expressing thus the emotionally-conceptual meaning of the portrait. There has been arising from time to time in the old literature on art issues the idea that any portrait-maker, whether he intends it or not, depicts in the portrait he is making his own features. It is possible that the matters could have been like that once. But as to our case it can be much better described by Goethe’s words as an “interdependence between the world of color and soul”, meaning the souls of the artist and his model.
It is worth mentioning that most models depicted in this feast of color are women. As to time of their creation the pieces are not so very widely spaced, but as to their painterly properties they are very different. In the portraits of 2005 (“Marina”, “Polina”, etc.) austere and precise drawing set bounds to planes of practically local color, that sometimes flares up with Art Nouveau purples or blues. Here takes place some limited transfusion of “model” and “culture”, it is not accidental that in certain portraits one can discern distant echoes of once famous big styles, each of which presumably fits content of its corresponding model.
In the age of internet and other similar pleasures personality gets leveled down, art loses individual characteristics. It might be that humanity gets what it deserves. But Leonid Petrushin’s art brings us back to the world of tranquility, love, and of lofty art values.