"Andrei Yesionov’s Visionary Realism" Automatic translate

The San Salvatore in Lauro Museum presents an exhibition of works by watercolorist, master of contemporary Russian fine art, academician of the Russian Academy of Arts Andrei Yesionov. The project “Visionary Realism of Andrei Yesionov” was organized by the museum in collaboration with the Russian Academy of Arts under the supervision of curator Marco Di Capua. About 100 works of the artist will be exhibited in Rome, including his watercolors and drawings, which allows visitors to immerse themselves in the artistic research of a talented Russian master.

Andrey Yesionov lives and works in Moscow, has prestigious awards. The author’s works are in museum collections in Moscow (Moscow Museum of Modern Art), St. Petersburg (State Russian Museum), Florence (Academy of Fine Arts and Drawing), Kazan (State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan), Tashkent (State Museum of Art of Uzbekistan) and many others.

The recognition of Andrei Yesionov in the international art scene testifies to the significant path of this extraordinary artist. Having gone through all the stages of classical art education, Esionov suspended his artistic career for 20 years, becoming an entrepreneur. Only in 2010 did he return to art and devote himself completely to painting, which, according to the author, is comparable to “returning to breathing”. A break in art was for Andrei Yesionov a period of intensive accumulation of visualization experience and compositional structures, which was subsequently reflected in the works of the master.

For a short period of time, the artist deliberately performed in several pictorial genres, primarily in portraiture. His fame is due to a series of portraits of Russian intellectuals - these are the images of the writer Vladimir Voinovich, filmmakers Pyotr Todorovsky and Eldar Ryazanov, world chess champion Anatoly Karpov, USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev and others, painted in oil on canvas. However, Yessionov’s favorite technique remains watercolor, which he interpreted in a new, modern way. The artist forms the image of a moment of life, suspended between the realistic image and the “other” symbolic, fairy-tale dimension. What at first seems a fleeting reflection of everyday life in the author’s works turns into something extraordinary. The impeccable technique of execution is so high that it represents a way to overcome reality itself, being a kind of visionary figure.

Yessionov draws inspiration from his travels to Europe, from the epoch-making changes and political changes of the former Soviet Union that he experienced: passers-by, street artists, children and animals are the main characters that inhabit his world. According to the author, humanity is in constant motion. From mass tourism of the rich to large migratory flows of the poor̆ population. Thus, the exposition tells about the changes and contradictions of mankind in the entangled relationship with its “I”, with its consciousness focused only on consumption or on the dream to consume.

The exhibition "Visionary Realism of Andrei Yesionov" is the "second" stage of a series of personal exhibitions aimed at popularizing the art, art studies and poetry of Andrei Yesionov in Italy. After Florence and Rome, the exhibition will be held in Milan and Venice.

A peculiarity of the Roman exposition is the “extrasensory” involvement of Laura Bosetti Tonatto, the world-famous perfumer who created a number of aromas for the works of Andrei Yesionov, which complement the picturesque reality of the paintings with new sensations.

The Andrei Esionov’s Visionary Realism exhibition is accompanied by a catalog issued by Il Cigno GG publishing house with critical articles by curator of the exhibition Marco Di Capua and written assessments by art critics Tomaso Montanari, Alexander Rozhin and Victoria Noel-Johnson.