LLEI D'ART 11

about the cover Oleg Sergeev Postulating the Nude Born in Moscow in 1956, Sergeev has been a member of the Russian Artists’ Union since 1988. The image of the nude –a favourite, but not exclusive, motif– is one of the noblest subjects in both painting and sculpture, and remains frequent to this day. Sergeev chooses compositions to place figures on, and then contextualizes them by making reference to historical moments, mythological figures or –in more modern pieces– states of mind or spiritual moods, like day dreams. His pastels are delicate in form, albeit charged with solemnity and bearing a message. He recreates scenes stolen from intimacy, where the privacy of a feeling or an emotion seems to have succumbed to the eye of the artist. Many of the women he represents are caught in moments of unease, abandonment or grief. The nudity of their body is merely the framework that contains the exposure of the soul and melancholy. Canvasses stripped of all kinds of spatial reference, atmospheres condensed onto tulles, and flat or imprecise backgrounds that that spill over into a burst of colour that focusses all the viewer’s attention on the figure and its dramatic weight. It unswervingly captures the viewer’s gaze into an enclosed space whose limits are only breached within the contextualisation of the character in a particular moment and situation, and always with a wise emotional intelligence. Without the need to turn to scandalous daring, this Muscovite artist confronts the nude with devotion and sensibility. He calls to metaphor more than the erotic undertone, although the soft velvets evoke the realist hypothesis of some racy 18 th century works. The poses are chastely elegant. There is a certain wish to depict an ideal beauty using relaxed or reposing bodies, profiled against depthless backgrounds. A unique synthesis between the real and the ideal, the foundation of an academic tradition that lacks no formal Lienzos desprovistos de toda referencia espacial, atmósferas condensadas sobre tules, rasos, fondos imprecisos que se desbordan en un sinfín cromático que centra toda la atención en la figura y su carga dramática, al atrapar, de modo indefectible, la mirada del espectador dentro de un reducto cuyos límites sólo se traspasan con la contextualización del personaje en un momento y una situación determinados, y siempre haciendo uso de una sagaz inteligencia emocional. Oleg Sergeev. Desnudo / Nude , 2013. 95