From "Swamps" series

Petr Shvetsov presents his research into the frontiers of painting on the example of one apparently very simple theme - a landscape with a swamp. The texture of the painting undergoes a check on its ability to convey the depth of a waterlogged quagmire in which opinions and ideas get bogged down. An initial impulse for work has been given by the popular scientific book by N. Sukachyov "Swamps, their formation, development and properties", which has been published in Leningrad in 1926. For this reason "Swamps" is not a series of paintings in the strict sense, but a circle of works united by a single theme, by the initial desire to observe in maximum proximity the etymological essence of the swamps, its picturesque depth.

For his painstaking studio experiment Petr Shvetsov has chosen the motif of a marshlandscape with a central disturbing apperture —a water source, in the center of which a strange spot of light of unclear origin is concentrated. This haunting image, to which he returned again and again, oddly combines the harmony inherent in the forest landscape, with children's fears of a deep whirlpool. 

Each new work differs from the previous one both chemically and visually, stands one step further in the research perspective. The choice of genre motif determined the evolution of style, but the severity of the chosen colors initially resisted the salon and self-admiration inherent in the landscape genre as a whole. From the dry black theatricality, going back to the manner of the German "new wild ones", the study developed in the direction of images of a red swamp forest in the spirit of the experiments of early Mondrian and the disturbing visions of Munch and, finally, resulted in the calm coniferous channel of the landscape classics of the Russian Itinerants. Peering into the swamp turned into a movement backwards, to the art of the 19th century, during which the screaming animal horror of the pool went inside the canvases of traditional form, closed in them, lurked with an anxious tension. The landscape genre, prepared in a creative laboratory, turned into a harsh, straightforward painting without inscriptions and quotations-grimaces, without the ambiguities of the “message” and the reciprocal interactivity, without the hackneyed games of the signifier and the signified.

Text: Dmitry Ozerkov.