It now appears that one can — and I might add that one should try to do precisely this. It is necessary, provided that this soul is capable of experiencing joy and sorrow, weeping and dreams... Because this is the only way to evoke a response in another soul, to get across to someone else that no matter how tightly wrapped in such protective clothing as indifference, sarcasm, or cynicism, all that we resort to in the attempt to protect ourselves from this pitiless world. While thus protecting ourselves, we become callous without noticing it. We might become aware of it with just a timely message, a sign from another person, outwardly inconspicuous and unimportant. Like Birds is the title Viktor Medvediev chose for his one-man show arranged at the Koliory Gallery, a small but very popular art venue in one of the Lavra Monastery’s quiet patios in Kyiv.
The exposition is also small: about twenty pictures leaving one with a sense of quiet fulfillment and some elegiac lightness. His works can be described as landscapes. They are not specific: cities, streets, trees, etc. However, they have a strong aura, lightness of the spirit: sorrow, joy, and hope. Something only a really good artist can convey — and a very sincere one, I would add, who is not afraid to be so open- hearted at our thoroughly rational and moderately bourgeois times. This sincerity was a pleasant surprise to Viktor’s colleagues, because they know him as a restrained and rather skeptical intellectual, traits that have to be somehow or other mirrored by his creativeness. But a downright romantic? However, it is also true that such unpredictable creative transformations are merely more evidence of high professionalism along with versatile creative interest and potential. At the vernissage, embarrassed by the shower of compliments he received, Viktor Medvediev said jocularly, “With this display I decided to drive the last nail in the lid of the coffin of romanticism. It closes the subject, and I will now paint only adult male pictures.”
Let us hope this was only a joke.
