Weekdays and Holidays

In the subjects of Arseny Kraynyukov’s works, everyone can recognize themselves: here I am as a child arriving at the sea with my parents, here we have gone out into nature with friends for the May holidays, and here we watch the neighbors building a new house. The artist’s stories create a sense of belonging and find an echo in every heart.

Arseny Kraynyukov works with planar compositions and local color, at times achieving a remarkably beautiful play of color patches. For the artist, the principal means of artistic reflection is figurative painting, which for him combines naturally with a decorative principle. In his works Arseny turns to the plastic solutions of the Early Renaissance masters and deliberately mixes solid and liquid materials, which, in the author’s view, creates a saturated, vibrating surface where pigments, layering upon one another, form a textural ground for his color decisions.

"For me, what matters most in art is discovery and play. I find it interesting to reflect on visual culture and social context, to consider the subjects of my works through an interdisciplinary approach. I hold to the tradition of plastic form-making and believe in the point and the line on a plane, RGB, the blue grounds
of Giotto and BIOS, the red cinnabar of the Russian icon and the gray ochre of Soviet modernism. The artistic solutions I succeed in finding on canvas I apply in design and artistic decoration; for me, the scaling of an idea in space is essential. Despite my interest in every form of art, after all possible experiments I would like to return to canvas, oil, paper, pencil, a short poetic text, the silent contemplation of the world..." Arseny Kraynyukov.

The exhibition "Weekdays and Holidays" invites the viewer to slow the pace of city life, to shift the focus of attention toward nature and simple human connection.