Published in the Catalogue for the Exhibition ”The Inner Light“, 2002
Naturhistorisches Museum Wien
ISBN 3-900275-89-0
PORTRAIT OF FIRE and other subjects
on the paintings by Sergey POPOLSIN
As someone who is purported to have vision, I have been asked to write an article for the one-man exhibition at the “Naturhistorisches Museum” in Vienna which features a comprehensive survey of the artistic work of the 37-year old blind painter Sergey Popolsin. It is a risky undertaking as I do not know the artist personally and have only seen the exhibits as reproductions.
The technique and method of painting, the intensity of feeling and the struggle towards the light are so appealing that I was unable to refuse and am now trying somehow to express my point of view about contents and form of the paintings which seem to me like a daily journal.
Paintings by Sergey Popolsin represent more the approach to life by the young than the works of the late artists of the so-called “Classic Modernism”. Sketched paintings by this “full-blooded” artist leave ones fantasy plenty of scope. Depending on ones temperament or gusto, it seems one could carry on with each picture. This type of painting rather meets the trend of the 80’s and 90’s works by the “Young Wild” in Germany and Austria.
The best of Sergey Popolsin’s paintings also show traces of the Russian-orthodox spirituality. I am thinking of “Portrait of T.F.’s Soul”, “Self-Portrait” or “Stalker”.
The flight of the soul to the anonymous Christian mysticism is and would be a good way of self-realisation, of giving people under stress healing visual messages. As is well-known, blind artists see, hear and feel better and deeper than those who are constantly confronted with the wordly temptations and enticements of an insatiable consumer society.
Belief, hope and love are a threesome which accompany and protect the admirably striving artist from Irkutsk. Were Dostoyevsky still alive, Sergey Popolsin would probabely be the hero of a new novel.
I am not sure whether this article meets the facts. It could be so. Art and life are ambivalent.
Professor Wolfgang GRANINGER
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