About the Artist
“My objective is to provoke a reaction, a feeling, an impression, to give the people a chance to trust their imagination, to see the images and colors the way I see them, that’s why my painting can’t be static or unemotional. (Victor Bokarev)
VICTOR BOKAREV Honorary academician of the Russian Academy of Art, Member of the Creative Union of Artists of Russia, International Arts Fund, Silver Medal of the Union of Artists of Russia, Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Art, Laureate of International festivals. Born in Moscow. Lives and works in Moscow and Barcelona. Education – Surikov Art School, Moscow State Art and Industry Academy named after Stroganov. Over 60 personal and 100 group exhibitions both in Russia and abroad :Sweden, Spain, USA, Belgium, Italy, Austria, etc. The paintings are in the Museum of the Contemporary Art (Moscow), Russian State Institute of the Art Research, consulates of Russia in Munich (Germany) and Alexandria (Egypt), in galleries, museums, private and corporate collections in Russia, USA, Taiwan, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, etc. The artist’s style is abstract and semi-abstract expressionism. Victor Bokarev is the first Russian abstractionist whose works have been published in La Bible de L’art Abstrait (the Bible of Abstract Art) , Paris, 2008. In 2008 there was a documentary about Victor on the Culture channel of the Russian T.V.
VICTOR BOKAREV. ART WITH NO BOUNDARIES “…As image entering an image and object hiding in an object” Boris Pasternak
The contemporary culture insistently demands real artistic emotion whereas loosing its “technology”. Its forms demonstrate higher and higher tendency to fix the style sample, to create more and more steady models capable of immediate reproduction. Little by little they are loosing the vividness and unique of the artistic language, mastering the strategy of recreation of their own matrix structures. Few are the artists operating in the field of actual art who manage to break this precept and offer an independent approach, a very personal view on the processes taking place in the modern culture. For several decades one of those has been Victor Bokarev, an amazing artist continuing the tradition of the “action painting”.
His poetics is exquisitely baroque whereas possessing strict disciplineand absolute preciseness.
“The space actually means our presence in this world”, says James Joys,and this is exactly how Victor Bokarev sees the reality feeling it stereoscopically, approaching it closely, touching its surface, its relief,turning the distant into near, translating it into majestic. The scale is totally lost in his space, all the orientation points and coordinates are confused – mental becomes material gaining the critical mass and emerging into a magic landscape of the visible – tactile – deep.
“I like the apparition of material”, says Osip Mandelshtam meaning not to separate a poetical language from the visual-plastic one. In the artsystem of Victor Bokarev their imagery doubles and gets together sparkling in its polarity as one undivided essence. Its phenomena is filledwith the element of question and answer, form and transformation, getting from one state to another absolutely unexpectedly.
Victor Bokarev’s world lives in the same state moving inside the “drama” of color along the orbit of time and space, building the compositionswhere the horizontal and the vertical are capable of changing their place.
When emerging into abstract the master’s art finds its revelation in the purity of the Ideal. It starts from a light touch or, on the contrary, a powerful strike of a brush alternating breath in and breathout, not knowing the resistance of the material. The secret and the evident live together in the complex layers of painting where the technology is hidden and the surface is inspired like a new born space.
The creative choice is subject to the expression of his free creative will, reflecting at the same time his perception of the complexity of the reality.
Victor Bokarev allows his thoughts to get themselves their own form, coming from inside.
Each time his search for harmonic conditions starts anew, from the white sheet of paper or canvas when he overturns the space onto the spectator and the creativity is revealed in the passive voice as in the Old Russian icon painting.
Each Bokarev’s composition is a “small green door in the wall” that allows one to penetrate into the inner hierarchy of the art measurement and to get into the world of the realized dreams. Its topography lives indeep personal space of the artist getting through its own conflict and reconciliation inviting one to join this festival of creativity, its mysterious imaginary turning a spectator into a participant just as it happens in a myth. The paintingss of Victor Bokarev possess their own aura, their special light and energy zone knowing no distance, pretending just a scene meanwhile drawing the spectator in its magic layers, itsuniversal condition where the time having approached its limit, stops and comes to a standstill.
Abstract or figurative, the artist’s paintings always show the reality “on the other side” thus revealing the true and authentic. They lure one into their plasma phenomena provoking a nostalgia of the ideal “golden age” of the past that had determined our present.
Brought to life by the instant spiritual reaction the artist’s compositions sparkle with the dual presence of emotion and intelligence.
Vitaly Pazukov, member of the board of The International Fund of Kasimir Malevich, chief curator of the State Moscow Center of the Contemporary Art