Home > Exhibitions

The presentation of the two works of Anikonovs

"The two who left the time behind", that took place December 18th, 2007 turned out one of the most significant artistic events of the past year.

Anikonov's creativity is advancing into the reign of the burning problems of modern art. The authors may look impudent by presenting to the public the "raw", "not proved by the shelf life" ( the retrospective is not his strong point), just from under the artist's brush canvases, thus marking his position in the present time.

The preamble of the show is a dark room with two spot-lighted paintings covered by white cloth with female figures slightly appearing through it, a dark passage leading to the paintings and lined with black tree branches with dangling bright-white carnations in medicine test tubes, and two slim girls holding big clock dials, clad in black and white looking as if they have just stepped out from the paintings. The ballerinas start moving, the black and the white colors begin to whirl making white turn black and vice versa. In the dark hall that was first taken as something eternal, the present starts pulsing with the sound of the second hand of the clock. The contrast between the dark and the light, the eternity and the present comes to the climax when the veil slides down from the paintings.

The painted clock hands turn out to make the "border line" between the dark and the light, the hidden and the enlightenment. The dialectics of eternity thus makes the theme of the diptych "The two who left the time behind".

Anikonov's pictures seem to be balancing upon the freakish side of symbolism and experiment, the expressed materiality and the ephemeral moments of life. The multi-layered, multi-factured expressiveness, the silent harmony create an impression of the movement, the imperceptible movement of the second hand of the clock or the inaudible flow of the sand in the sand-glass.

The reflections of the time transformations still kept the audience. And the refraining line "the quality of the time is what matters" made every viewer reflect - every official, businessman and professional.