Oleg Khvostov

Oleg Khvostov was born in Leningrad in 1972. He is a selftaught artist. At the end of the 1990s, Oleg joined the Brotherhood of the New Blockheads (Tovarishchestvo Novye Tupye). The New Blockheads gave absurdist performances, inspired by Dadaism and the poetics of the OBEIRU group. Khvostov, however, chose painting as his preferred medium.

Khvostov’s art from early in the first decade of the new century leaned toward portraiture, and is marked by brutal expressionism. In a contrasting psychedelic gamma, the artist reinterprets themes from the classics, from Raphael and Leonardo to Masaccio or Goya, revealing the primal, vital impulse in them. The series Memorial to the Leaders and New Leniniana are dedicated to figures in mass culture and politics (Lenin, Hitler, Christ, Marilyn Monroe). His work from these years includes group images of his colleagues in the New Blockheads and multiple self-portraits.

By the middle of the decade Khvostov had formed his own, individual language and his own painted universe, switching to landscape. This universe is completely smooth and even; there are none of the wrinkles or kinks of the objective world. All of the forms – whether tilled fields, trees, cows at pasture, or colourful, abstract spheres – appear as if crystallized from some chemical process. The volumes increase, becoming round, like bodies.

Khvostov’s world is completely erotic, seductive. But this body does not belong to a person who has transformed into a fantastical planetary landscape. The substance that makes up all of the visible landscape forms recalls not a natural, organic material, but rather a polymer. And the cold lighting that evenly fills all of the artist’s pictures compels us to believe that it is a virtual reality we see before us, or a video game –
none of the elements of which are real.

Oleg is not only a discerning viewer, but also a modern visionary, providing us with digital imagery. The artist feely mixes the contrasting chiaroscuro of Giorgio de Chirico, the geometrism of Fernand Léger, the expression of Frieda Kahlo, and the post-Suprematist peasant series of Kazimir Malevich. After this, the resulting image is polished in a theoretical “graphic editor”: a multi-layered acrylic painting using various tones imitating the gradient fill of Photoshop. Khvostov works with modernist primitivism as he would with a ready-made artistic language that has long ago become classic and is accessible for “dissection” in the context of the
many centuries of art’s history.

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