America-3 From the “Swamps” series

Pyotr Shvetsov presents a project‑research into the boundaries of painting, using a seemingly simple motif — a landscape with a swamp — as an example. The painterly texture is put to the test here in terms of its ability to convey the depth of the submerged quagmire, in which the eye and the meaning get bogged down. The initial impetus for the work was the popular science book by V. N. Sukachev, “Swamps, Their Formation, Development and Properties,” published in Leningrad in 1926. It describes the causes and forms of deformation of acidic bog soil, provides classifications of bogs by type and species, and examines bog flora and fauna.

Material experimentation with semantic layers is characteristic of Pyotr Shvetsov’s work as a whole. In the “Bogs” project, painting comes to the fore; the canvas takes on all the complexity, and for the first time, the strategies of meaning‑generation are regulated almost exclusively by the behavior of the pictorial 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, moving a step further in the research perspective. The choice of a genre-based motif determined the evolution of the style, but the severity of the chosen colors initially resisted the salon‑style and self‑admiration inherent in the landscape genre as a whole. From the dry, black theatricality that harks back to the style of the German “new wilds,” the exploration developed toward images of a red swamp forest, in the spirit of the experiments of early Mondrian and the тревожные visions of Munch, and finally flowed into the calm, coniferous course of the landscape classics of the Russian Peredvizhniki. Peering into the swamp turned into a backward movement, towards the art of the 19th century, during which the screaming animal horror of the pool went inside the traditional canvases, locked into them, hidden by anxious tension. The landscape genre, dissected in the creative laboratory, turned into a harsh, straightforward painting without inscriptions and quotes, without the ambiguities of the "message" and reciprocal interactivity, without the games of the signifier and the signified.

Text: Dmitry Ozerkov