| Recently the Broadway Gallery NYC exhibited the work of Ukraine-born artist Igor Zaytsev. The pieces in the show were selected paintings that may appear realistic or abstract but in reality are extractions—a combination of the two extremes. The work asks the viewer to question what they are seeing: something realistic or something abstract or both. These paintings also represent the challenges of being spontaneous, working with different color schemes, and going on an artistic journey that pushes Zaytsev to go outside of his established comfort zone of figurative and classical artwork. |  |
Milton Fletcher
Recently the Broadway Gallery NYC exhibited the work of Ukraine-born artist Igor Zaytsev. The pieces in the show were selected paintings that may appear realistic or abstract but in reality are extractions—a combination of the two extremes. The work asks the viewer to question what they are seeing: something realistic or something abstract or both. These paintings also represent the challenges of being spontaneous, working with different color schemes, and going on an artistic journey that pushes Zaytsev to go outside of his established comfort zone of figurative and classical artwork.
Rigidly trained in the painting style of the Renaissance masters with an emphasis on realism and groomed to be a classical artist during the final days of the Soviet Union, Zaytsev ultimately decided after moving to America to explore different, less realistic approaches to his art by experimenting with surrealism, which resulted in acclaimed works such as Muse and Loneliness of a Queen. When it came to experimenting with abstraction, however, the results didn’t completely satisfy Zaytsev, so he decided to fuse the techniques of realism and abstraction and developed an extraction style. “I stopped doing realistic, classical works exclusively because it was limiting my imagination,” Zaytsev says. “I started working with spontaneous images on the canvas, which gives me the energy of its own self—from the canvas. Then when I see something that forms, sometimes realistic forms, sometimes abstract forms, and it will become clear what I have to work with but not exactly in the proper way as they do in classical, realistic paintings.”
The painting Mistery is perhaps the most obvious example of Zaytsev‘s extraction technique in the show. Its subject are flowers, its rendering is sharp but also gauzy—an interesting clash of clear-eyed and somnolent visions as the colorful flowers seem to float on black and dark-blue background. Scetch for Reflections is related to Mistery in its subject matter of flowers. It has more restricted color scheme of blues, whites, and yellows. Its title is more direct than Mistery in that it tells the viewer it subject matter is a reflection, but these flowers appear to hover in a murky place where the water and horizon lines are indistinct, giving the piece a dreamlike quality. As one takes in these paintings, the contrasting color schemes become a key component to the works’ impact and formal strategy. “I always use this technique: for instance, when blue exists there has to be some spot in the painting, at least a very small one, which will work with the opposite color,” as Zaytsev observes. “Like a predominately blue painting will have some yellow.” Indeed with Blue Crystal, a small bit of yellow pigment is entwined with grays and blues with a bit of wash in the background, so the warm yellow stands out and creates a vibrate luminance it wouldn’t have without these other, darker cool and neutral colors being the prominent hues of the piece. Another example of this technique but using a different palette is Element. Featuring red and orange with white and yellow contrasted with grays and blues in the background, it is a classic example of playing warm and cool color schemes off each other. The composition has an otherworldly feel that can remind one of the fantasy settings made famous by Roger Dean, creator of the artwork for the classic progressive rock group Yes. Refraction3—Appearance, the only vertical piece in the show, has one of the most basic color palettes: yellow and green, black and white. The figures range from geometric shapes to the organic curves that suggest plant life. There is a vibration that pulses in the piece. This effect is enhanced by the negative space that creates undulating forms that have enveloping lyricism.
Taken together, all of these paintings represent the artistic adventure that Zaytsev has been on. It is an exploration that culminates in the viewer’s interpretation what is realistic and what isn’t. “The parts, giving the signs of the image, they lead the observer to a more clear, expressive image because if I start to continue the classical realistic image, it becomes just a realistic painting, which I don’t want to do in this approach,” as Zaytsev explains. “Instead, the image is giving just a guess, a symbol, and gives the observer the freedom to imagine the rest.” So all power to the imagination: the more one looks, the more one potentially sees consciously and unconsciously in these works. As these pieces encourage, the viewer’s interpretation is more important than the actual inspiration of work for the artist—just as Zaytsev has been striving for.
