Vladimir Kolesnikov

Artist's Story

In his work, Homo Ludens (1938), the Dutch historian and cultural theorist, Johan  Huizinga states  that play though  not the sole element, is primary to and necessary for the generation of culture..  'How much," he asks " of the play spirit  is still alive in our own day and generation and IN and AS play and never leaves it.  (Ref Huizinga 1955, p. 173) 

Vladimir Kolesnikov, a true Homo Ludens, transforms contemporary concepts into his own vision of the world with the play factor  as a dominant of any play factor. Quoting one of his critics, A. Parshikov, "Numerous citations from the creation of the Great Renaissance appear before us as through kaleidoscope glasses through which the author brings his ideas to us.  The perfectly verified composition, precise work out of the picturesque plane, pedantic, anatomically exact drawing-here are the technical declaration of Vladimir Kolesnikov's artistic language. 

Perfectly drawn naked bodies, taken from the drawing of the Renaissance titans, becoming not the aforesaid, but the denoting of the author's plot, in other words, passing to the  sphere of  Europeans (an ideal naked body) manifested during the epoch of high classics and elevated to the absolute in the Great Renaissance,  he uses it as a module of his own figurative formations, brings it in the context of the contemporary artistic situation, at the same time he does not conceal anything and, on the contrary. clearly demonstrating this perennial constructive element. 

Kolesnikov's art,  from one side is the representation of the postmodernist scheme of juggling with the citations ("Triple Elvis") and, at the same time the experiment on its regulation with the help of a  module (Sings", "School X").  Kolesnikov's paintings thus acquire one very important quality-the tectonics.  The direct analogy to order system arises:it proves once again that the artist was not mistaken in the determination of the male European  art archetype.  A game with images of the mass culture, double citing and other postmodernist moves , thus  acquire  fundamentally, contemplation and certain honesty, uncharacteristic, but so pleasant for actual painting.."