RESTAVRACIA N: firm foundation for the creative projects of the Russian Academy of Arts
23 October 2014
Eugene Zevin participated in the first exhibition of non-conformist art in Moscow that were organised in 1974. Since 1980 his works have been displayed at international exhibitions and sold time and time again at high profile auctions such as Phillips, Bonhams и Christie’s, Phillips de Pury, and been displayed at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. His paintings hang in the largest museums and galleries in Europe, US, Israel, Canada, Russia and other countries. In 2013 a personal exhibition was held at the State Russian Museum of Saint Petersburg.
Looking at your pictures on can tell immediately that you’re in love with constructivism.
I have a degree in architecture but I’ve never designed anything as an architect. My thesis supervisor, prominent soviet architect Constantine Melnikov was one of the founders of constructivism in Russia. Just look at the round house he lived in (the house in Krivokolenny alley), it’s a constructivism masterpiece. Like the hexagonal windows designed in such a way that at any time of the day, no matter where the sun is in the sky, there’s gonna be sunlight coming into the building through one of the windows. Naturally, Melnikov had some kind of an impact on me back when I was a young budding artist. I feel really privileged to have met and known personally this unique man.
When you’re creating a composition, you feel and recreate causal relationships between objects and phenomena but what is important in portraits?
Through a portrait you can understand a person, understand their soul. I just completed a series of portraits for the 20th anniversary of our Academy, which includes portraits of Bulat Okudzhava, Peter Todorovsky, Fazil Iskander, Nikolai Petrov and others. I called it Heroes of our Time. With these portraits I didn’t just wanna make them look like the actual people, I wanted to try and get across the character and personality of these outstanding people that played such a crucial role for our generation. I did the paintings in a no-holds barred expressionist manner. Portraits had never really been my forte but I really liked working on them so I took it one step further and created a big composition in which these portraits act as a frame. Inside there is a big Last Supper picture. All these people are brought together in a single composition, they are hovering in central Moscow, over the Kremlin, representing a huge cultural level, they’re the culture that our generation was weaned on and that shaped our worldview.
You say portraits are not your forte. Do you find it more rewarding to work in other genres?
Well, truth be told whether it’s a landscape, a portrait or a still life, for me the most important bit is still the composition but I really wanted to do portraits of people from our Academy, kind of put them on the canvas the way I remember them.
And do you live in the past, the present or the future?
I live mostly in the present, I don’t think much about the future and, unfortunately, as I grow older I’m beginning to live more and more in the past…
How do you manage to combine your creative work with your public and management work at the Academy?
I’m a people person, I enjoy public work, spending time with people. If you look at my life I’ve always combined public work and creative work. I mostly have to deal with creative people and luckily it doesn’t really take too much time but it’s more than enough time to understand the emotions and problems of the people I deal with. Our Academy has several specialisations: there is the exhibition hall, then there’s the publishing and holding of cultural events. All members of the Academy are prominent shakes and movers in art and culture in Russia, who’ve at least been awarded a state premium or the status of a people’s artiste. It’s a curious fact that our academy has the largest number of people’s artistes of the USSR…
It’s a well-known fact that every creative project needs a firm foundation…
True, culture can’t grow and develop on its own, it needs to be nurtured through public recognition and demand, the talent must be protected against the dull realities of everyday life, if you will, it’s like a garden needing a gardener. And for the Russian Academy of Arts its vice president (who’s also a co-dean at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations) Natalia Kuzmina is this gardener. Retavracia N and its CEO Enver Kuzmin have also been paying a lot of attention and providing a lot of support to the Academy and we are most grateful to them for that. Ms Kuzmina is an outstanding person, she overflows with creative energy that allows her to quickly pick optimal solutions and implement them.
When selecting works for your exhibition hall, what are your main guiding principles?
There is the notion of painting quality. I’ve always spent a lot of time studying painting and drawing techniques. After participating in western exhibitions I realised that you want to hone your technique so you won’t have to be ashamed of your paintings later. As it turns out picking artists for a good exhibition is no easy task. At the moment there are just too many amateurs out there. I mean for every hundred artists who want to take part in an exhibition you’re lucky if you find five or six that are really any good. And it’s not just my opinion. In the 1980s when the iron curtain was lifted and Russian artists started having exhibitions in the west and a lot of unsavoury stuff then came out. I remember this one exhibition where a famous British art critic said that while Russian artists’ works had ‘a lot of nervous energy coming off of them’ the works presented at the exhibition ‘were sorely lacking in painting quality’ (it was during the Perestroika). And the artists that managed to improve their quality of painting they have endured: Rabin, Nemukhin, Zelkov: they have a very good technique, they do very professional pictures and so they’ve gone down in the history of international painting.
What is the most important thing for you in art?
Frozen motion in the picture, there must be some kind of tension, a picture just falls apart without that.