From "Swamps" series. Ice show 1982. Diptych

Peter Shvetsov presents a project exploring the boundaries of painting using the example of one seemingly simple motif – a landscape with a swamp. The picturesque texture is tested here for its ability to convey the depth of a submerged quagmire, in which gaze and meaning become entangled. The initial impetus for the work was given by V. N. Sukachev's popular science book "Swamps, their formation, development and properties", published in Leningrad in 1926. It describes the causes and forms of deformation of acidic swampy soil, provides classifications of marshes by type and species, and examines swamp flora and fauna. Material experimentation with semantic layers is characteristic of Peter Shvetsov's work in general. In the Swamps project, painting comes to the fore, the canvas takes over all the complexity, and for the first time the strategies of meaning generation are regulated almost exclusively by the behavior of the picturesque masses... 
 

The Marshes project documents the gradual unfolding of the canvas format behind alkalis, mud, fats, soils and varnishes; the consistent purification of painting from the tangibility of sculpture and object; the evolution from material to image. That is why "Marshes" is not a painting series in the strict sense of the word, but a range of works united by one theme, the initial desire to peer as closely as possible into the etymological essence of the swamp, into its picturesque depth.

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.