Published in the Catalogue for the Exhibition “The Inner Light”, 2002
Naturhistorisches Museum Wien
ISBN 3-900275-89-0
The Painter Sergey POPOLSIN
Before I started to write these lines, I had a long look at the painting “Churchyard”. I then shut my eyes tightly and tried with closed eyes to visualise a churchyard. That is to say blind with my “inner vision”.
But I don’t have one, I only have a visual memory of 1993, oil, canvas, 55x46.
We are more or less the same age. He was born in 1964 when Krushev was replaced by Breshnev for whatever reasons. I have read that Popolsin was born in the region of Chabarovsk, in a tiny village in the Taiga. That is somewhere in the far east, on the Chinese border, a place where in the 30’s the jews were deported to. The Taiga – that is a very beautiful and endless forest. And a village in the Taiga – that is a place where nobody wants to go back to. “Quiet little river”, 70x50, oil, canvas, 1998.
He grew up in Mariinsk. You will naturally have heard that Mariinsk is a medium-sized industrial town, somewhere between Tibet and the North Pole. “Cave”. The capital of the western siberian GULAGs.
His military service he undertook in the Soviet army during the same years as I. Naturally, you also know how that goes. Like two years of ones life flying by ‘without being noticed’, the war in Afghanistan, the 27th Party Day of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Chernobyl, the soldier sleeps and the length of service runs on. “Samovar”. And you can bet that today, 16 years later, I still can take apart and put together again a Kalashnikov in 40 seconds blindfolded. But to visualise a churchyard with my eyes shut – that I cannot do.
“Double-bass”, “Piano”, “Rain. October”, “Rain. July”.
I can see for myself that it is July. I am not blind. “Self Portrait”, 1994.
Then he studied at the College of Art in Irkutsk. “Town. Street-crossing. Traffic Lights”. That is where Lake Baikal is. The deepest, cleanest and most beautiful lake on the planet earth, where fishes are killed through industrial waste. There he was taught socialist realism and historical materialism. Do you know what that is? He knows it, surely. He has destroyed nearly all his works from that period. I also lined up for those examinations in those 80’s. Only afterwards I had nothing which I could have destroyed. And I will never be an artist, even then if I were to go blind. “She has gone...”, 55x46, oil, canvas, 1994.
1997, “Landscape in Blue”. I can now also see it in front of me with closed eyes. And I believe that the world in which we live is terribly unfinished, contradictory and incomprehensible. And we people are unfinished in every sense of the word. I see the “Churchyard” and am reminded that we are mortal. In comparison with this disadvantage, the existence or non-existence of wings, sight, tail or talent are simply irrelevant.
“Window”, oil, canvas,1992. He went blind in 1990. “The Dot”, 1998.
What has happened? Why? How is he working now? How does he see and understand colour, perspective and space? Where does the energy for this enormous labour come from? And what is it really, talent, gift?
Curiosity is here out of place.
In great demand is interest in painting. But the paintings of Sergey Popolsin do not need my comments. You can see for yourself that God is in these pictures.
HE probably sends us also sore trials as gift.
Alexey ROSANOV
Man of Dramatic
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