In the year of the centenary of VKhUTEMAS in Samara, artist Vladimir Potapov presents one of his latest works, "When Eternity Is Bracketed" (2020), in the permanent exhibition of the avant-garde halls of the Samara Regional Art Museum. The well-known experimenter, who is in constant search for a new pictorial language and considers it his most important task to update it at all costs, is formally related to the works of outstanding masters of the Russian avant-garde era, which are on display - Le Dantu, Dymshchits-Tolstoy, Adlivankin, Lentulov, Kuznetsov , Rozanov, Malevich, Burliuk, Adlivankin, Konchalovsky and others.
Vladimir Potapov works in various genres and media of contemporary visual arts, mainly in painting, and is known as the author of research projects on the current state of painting. Works by Vladimir Potapov are in the collections of the Tretyakov Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art in Krakow (MOSAK), the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art PERMM, the Museum of Contemporary Art. Sergey Kuryokhin (St. Petersburg), K. Sorokin and V. Smirnov Foundation for Contemporary Art and others.
Sergey Popov: "The work by Vladimir Potapov belongs to the Distortion series. In terms of format, all large-format works in the series are the same - they are executed on standard sheets of plywood 152x152. These are the squares in which the narrative unfolds, which, as a rule, is turned to Soviet history - and this alone brings them closer to the art of the avant-garde, which also dealt with distortions.

Knowing and understanding this perfectly well, Potapov does not follow the visual solutions of the avant-garde, but proposes his own, which can be called metamodernist. The distortions in his painting are of a wave nature, while they are aimed at studying color, analyzing its strength and, in particular, movement in space.
The artist creates them by literally carving in layers of acrylic, using both the effect of chance and careful calculation of the action, as a result of which realistic figurative and abstract images freeze in an irreconcilable struggle on the complex surface of the picture.
Vladimir Potapov: "For me, the Russian avant-garde has always been an example of a lost paradise that left a mark, rewrote the history of art and sank into oblivion. And it seems that it was promised to us, and it seems that it can be returned, but I have a strong feeling that all attempts to return or build a dialogue with this era are always doomed to comparison. This alignment with the great seems to me a game of likeness, in that very naive attempt to put on my father's overcoat, standing in front of the mirror of history. We live in a new world, in a different time, which forms its own unique prerequisites for art. My task is to see, feel and grasp. So I form my own imprint of time, with which I come to the hall of the Russian avant-garde and say HERE!

Eng

KIRILL BLAGOLEPOV

ALL PALETTE GO TO HEAVEN