Andriy Shevchenko: Naive art cannot but be liked, because it is done by the author sincerely and honestly before himself. Automatic translate

November 27, 2014 in the Art Naiv Gallery at 24/26 Lyalin Lane, a personal exhibition of Evgeny Butenko’s “Mausoleum of the brain and air freshener” opened in Moscow.

Artist Evgeny Butenko has a motley biography and an indirect path. I will not take the reader’s time in a long, rich text with obscure and intentionally tied terms about his work and life. Eugene is original. I focus only on those turning points in his life that led him to the opening of this exhibition. Born in 1979 in Chisinau. He studied at the Faculty of Philology of the Slavic University. He worked as a courier, security guard, guide-translator, loader, handyman at the factory. Also worked as a graphic artist. He wrote poetry, prose, studied experimental music. He deliberately draws from 13 years old, ignoring secondary education. He came up with the role-playing “KGB game” in which the main point is to ironize over the idiocy and paperwork in the USSR.

At age 14, Eugene realized that art is what you need to devote your life to. His creative process is based on banter over the absurdity of situations and comes to mutations of the absurdity giving birth to his own world. His self-education is unsystematic - in the library Eugene read everything that caused emotional interest at that moment in which he was. Now his graphics are an image and a short text - a new original alloy - it has become a style that is already developing in painting.

Photo: Igor Dremin