Press

To write about the works of a painter one is fond of means accepting the perilous character of such an enterprise.
Every visual language is marked by singularity. The artist has his codes, his personal universe, his own style.
The result can only be a clumsy and vain travesty, an attempt tottering on illusory foundations. What then is the meaning of our desire to hear what is seen and felt?
"The eye listens", Claudel liked to repeat.
Let us remind ourselves that painting can only be an art of silence, and that its sole concern is the space of the interior.
One must therefore resign oneself to never saying anything that is satisfactory, complete, pertinent...
And yet... We nevertheless accept the challenge. What dominates in this confrontation with these works of art is our wish to say how deeply we are touched and moved by the paintings thus offered to our gaze. As though it were to a certain extent a matter of clarifying through words the feelings we have experienced.

I - The beginnings, Russia

From his earliest childhood on Volodia Popov began painting at Michurinsk, in Russia. For four years Volodia Popov received a solid grounding in graphics at the Vasnetsov School of Industrial Design.
In 1980 he entered the Mukhina Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg, being admitted to the department of Monumental Painting. From 1985 to 1994, working in collaboration with his friend Volodia Kostamov, he fulfilled many public assignments in different areas of Russia (notably in the towns and cities of Riazan, Vladimir, Tambov, Mouron...) In 1983 he became a member of the Union of Painters of Russia, which was then a necessary step for attaining a professional status.
For several years Volodia Popov experimented with abstract painting, inspired by his taste for Russian avant-garde pioneering in the styles of cubo-futurism, constructivism, suprematism, etc.
A fervent admirer of Malevich, he too felt that he had reached the "zero degree" in painting, and from then

on he satisfied his narrative inclinations by returning to figurative forms of expression.
Having acquired a rich experience as a designer of mosaics, as a painter of frescos, and as a painter, he now again concentrated his energies on the more intimate field of painting.
The year 2000 marked a turning-point in his career as an artist. After organizing several exhibitions in France , he chose to live and work in Paris, a city which in his eyes was a crucible for youthful talents, offering an ideal ferments for his creative inspiration.
Far from rejecting his past, Volodia Popov thus integrated his Russian heritage into his works thanks to a cosmopolitan view of art. His predilection for line and rhythm, his choice of colours, the frontal representation of his figures, the narrative enchantment of his paintings... are signs that need to be interpreted in the light of his Russian and Orthodox heritage. By exploiting the Slavic art of the icon, of popular prints and rustic fairs, the illustration of folklore tales, Volodia Popov has brilliantly achieved a synthesis between Eastern and Western art, the figurative and the abstract, the real and the imaginary.

Volodia Popov has tackled a variety of pictorial genres, exhibiting a particular talent for the female form and still-lifes.
Thanks to a mixture of classical rigour and romantic fantasy, totally unaffected by any desire to copy others, Volodia Popov has turned his back on "realistic" illusion and expresses his feeling for life through a deliberate and lucid deformation of nature, thanks to a melancholic lyricism, to the mediation of dreamworld and fable.
His works evolve in a magic atmosphere, in which predominate the inner life, meditation, aspirations to transcendence.
The enigma of womanhood, the surprise apparition of a portrait, the fairytale quality of certain objects... for Vladimir Popov these mighty constants, which supply the foundation of his work, are at the same time potentials within which his poetic sense enjoys free play.
Each painting offers the viewer a sensual delight which offers an introspective displacement thanks to an operation of magical enchantment.
Pleasure is the rule. However, one should not misinterpret Volodia Popov's objectives. It is not simply a question of esthetic enjoyment, rather it is a dialogue between melancholic sensibility and plastic beauty.

All of Volodia Popov's work is haunted by the female form. A "common presence" as Rene Char called it, it haunts the oneiric universe of this sensitive painter.

Usually displayed in introspective solitude, it is portrayed in an atmosphere of meditation and self-communion. Its presence is materialized in an atemporal narrative context. It seems to be suspended between this world and another that is indefinable. Left alone, it reveals its innate grace through its delicate attitudes.
Thus must one interpret a work like Morning coffee . We might, initially, be tempted to answer the question, "What is she looking at in the mirror?" by replying that she is carrying on a dialogue with her reflection; but if we take a closer look, the discordance between the reflection and the delicate inclination of her head negates this all too rapid affirmation. The mirror here is a synonym of transiency, and what we are invited to contemplate is the nature of her lonely reveries.
Notwithstanding the variety of frontal representations, there is in the gaze of Volodia's women an avoidance of intimacy. It is at one and the same time an openly avowed modesty, shunning every kind of voyeurism, and a presence-absence that leads to an introspection of the soul.
The forms of the female body are idealized; they constitute allegories of nature which

sometimes melt into it through a subtle play of transparency and the interpenetration of the spatial dimensions of the background with those of the female form. The Painter and his Model is a brilliant example of this intertangling against a unified material background. The model's body joins the creative act, and we witness a coming-and-going between woman, painter, and the subject of the creative act.
The female nude is a recurrent element in Volodia Popov's painting. Woman represents not only the magnification of the body but is also the symbol of Beauty and Eros.
For Volodia Popov the female nude is the starting point from which the artist creates a form of art that accords with his own imagination.
Despite poses that are sometimes lascivious, and the presence of many erotic symbols (long hair, transparent veils deliciously revealing nudity, the presence of suggestively shaped guitars...), there remains the ambivalence of sentiment: clouded beauty and an indefinable melancholy.
The figure of Venus seems to haunt the nude woman: that mysterious, sensuous beauty, a mythical lunar personality imbued with celestial qualities. In addition to a visible enjoyment of the female body, Volodia Popov's works reveal a universe of poetic imagery.

Whether it be long-limbed women depicted with curving, delicate, and rhythmic lines who move with voluptuous gestures (one thinks here of Dance on a flower ), lasciviously appearing women in an unreal home interior ( Lovely Dreams ), or women who are going about their daily chores ( Morning Coffee ), they invariably offer the viewer an image of desire and sensuality.
Volodia Popov's paintings perfectly sum up the entire history of the female nude in Western art.
Woman is, absolutely, the archetype of Love and Beauty, and all of Volodia Popov's works are suffused by her luminous presence.

Alongside of his female nudes, Volodia honours the individual with numerous portraits of usually isolated figures. He draws his inspiration from persons who are his neighbours, or whom he happens to meet, in order to avoid every attempt at sacralization.

These portraits of anonymous protagonists, derived from the artist's everyday existence, express above all the momentary glimpse of another's presence. Volodia Popov has achieved remarkable full-face, half-body or three-quarter-body portraits, which have been idealized, as though to move beyond the simple objective aspect of a face.
With half-closed eyes and averted gazes, these faces reveal sentiments that are deliberately dissimulated, and from which is excluded any direct confrontation with the viewer.
This idealization doubtless permits him the better to reveal the profound nature of his anonymous models. Their delicate attitudes are full of reserve; the hands are crossed or rest serenely, the clothes are simple and modest. The tender, slightly sad expression of the face expresses a well contained melancholy. In his portraits the sinuous lengthening of the features and the use of lines are never purely decorative. The harmony of hues in warm colours reinforces the feeling of sensed fragility. Through such means does Volodia Popov speak to us above all of humility and the humane.

Still-lifes are omnipresent sent in Volodia's painting.
At times the separate subjects of a painting, at others an integral part of his narrative works, these compositions of material objects attest his taste for form, the structu ration of space and ornamentation. Thanks to his still-lifes, Volodia expresses the full decorative richness of his painting by a subtle play of transparency and matter. Yellow and golden colours are favoured in order to capture the light and fix one's gaze.

The objects are chosen to evoke an atmosphere of intimacy inviting contemplation: chalices, bottles, small dishes, glass, earthenware pots, tea-pots, vases, fruits such as lemons, pears and apples... sinuous forms which in Volodia Popov's painting defy all the laws of gravitation.
As usual, the flattish composition, the elongated and simplified forms with their curving lines reveal a refusal of virtuosity in favour of oneiric freedom.
In effect Volodia transfigures the simplest, objects of everyday life and imbues them with dignity and presence. A dialogue is thus installed among these elements through the autonomization of their forms and symbolic valuations.
The closed composition of the painting, Shelf , recalls the organization of altar-pieces, with their outer and inner panels. Each object is isolated in a compartment which helps to stabilize a sense of the precarious equilibrium of long-stemmed bottles. Bandaged, the opaque bottles are thus individualized and seem to be affected by human sentiments.

There is in Volodia's work something of the order of the sy

mbol, of the riddle, an inclination towards the dream which surpasses the vision we are offered and which at the same time speaks beyond the words it suggests. Volodia is an idealist. More than the product of the intellect, his painting insists on being poetry.
Let us take a paining like Lovely Dreams : a graceful female nude asleep on a bed of pure architectural lines. It depicts an essential solitude at night-time. The world is outside, that is - outside all rational and logical representation. It floats in the beyond. A sensual painting, it attests the preeminence of the oneiric and the marvelous, to the detrmi nent of the visible.
With this painting Volodia chose to create a work that was above all else poetic, which resonates not only in a tactile but also in an oneiric manner.

In each of Volodia's paintings one is struck by his taste for lines, the extreme purity of the contours, the confrontation that results between the vertical and the horizontal. "In every picture I seek to find the perfect li ne" , Volodia explains, when he speaks of the essential role he grants to line drawing.
His training as a draughtsman and his personal taste for the illustrations of Russian folk tales enabled him very early on to regard his pictorial activity as above all a creative gesture. Volodia Popov says that he has been influenced by the pure and primitive aspect of Japanese prints. They revealed to him an absence of depth in compositions, unusual perspectives, the decorative character of curving lines, as well as freedom in the treatment of positioning of his figures.
Thanks to a solid grounding as a sculptor, he transposes to the canvas the plastic problems of sculpture, by simplifying forms and their partitioning.

The compositions of Volodia Popov's paintings are structured according to the laws of geometry, thanks to plane forms freed of all rigidly formal constraints.
No element seems to be superfluous. Purified, the composition facilitates the free movement of one's gaze. From Byzantine iconography Volodia Popov has derived a form of composition with an inversed frontal perspective, which permits the viewer to concentrate on the figure, positioned in the very centre of the canvas in an often hieratic attitude. All realistic representation having been thus excluded, the viewer's gaze is freed from the thralldom of semblance in order more easily to penetrate into a mysterious inner world. A realization of how precarious is the equilibrium between the different elements of the composition reinforces the evanescent character of his painting.

Freed of every realistic and illustrative tendency, Volodia Popov uses a rich palette of colours with limitless warm hues. He thus plays with a vast variety of possibilities, without upsetting his permanent search for harmony.
The flesh tints are delicate, lines and colours blend, the relationships between hues are treated with a sure sense of nuance, light is introduced by subtle gradations of yellow and golden tones.

As in icon painting, Volodia Popov prepares his backgrounds in a spirit of ceaseless textural research.
His painting thus becomes a physical work and exhibits its materiality.

"Art that expresses life is every bit as mysterious", Elie Faure used to say.

The works of Volodia Popov herein presented reveal his imaginative capacities and his sense of poetry.
If artistic creation is an effort to transcend reality, then one can appreciate the displacement offered here beyond the bounds of time.