Success stays with he who, in addition to professional mastery and skill, has a idea of plasticity. It is actually the presence of this idea that allows one to speak about a sculptor's individuality, his ability to create memorable works.
Sculptor Valery Yevdokimov belongs to those who possess such an idea of plasticity. I do not wish to sound profane with regard to the artist, but the theme of his work it is not of great importance to Valery Yevdokimov – be it "Family" (1977), "Concert of S. Richter" (1979), "Landscape. Ferapontovo" (1979), or "Ascension", "Dream" (1985), or "Contemplation" (1988). The basis of his creative method is determined, as he says himself, 'by the premonition of the inevitability of occurrence. This premonition comes about… during the making of the piece… it's a feeling of purification, transition into the world of free development of form and of a mysteriously attractive space. And this is underlain, sometimes at the level of subconsciousness, by an idea of plasticity.
It is noteworthy that the sculptor deems it necessary to add: "The absolute dimensions of plasticity are of no significance here. And the subject matter is good in as much as it helps to perform the association with this world. The spatial quality of being becomes the real content of a piece of sculpture or of a drawing. It is this that renders the real depth to the theme and determines the artist's place both in the artistic and in the spiritual hierarchy. For the depth of the image is unattainable without penetration in the liberating and healing world of form, without the feeling of transcending space in the composition and its details. Hence connection between ethical and esthetical".
The dismemberment of form in his "Family" with its planimetric section of figures – as if being thrown away from the center by a shock wave and falling down from the horizontally shifted supporting platform – represents a demonstrative allegory of human division, symbolic of the tragedy of decomposition of the generalized formula of family. The hidden dynamics of masses in this work, and Yevdokomov's favored play on the diagonal in the composition, suffice to recall his "Ascension" (1980), "Soul and Body" (1975), "In Memoriam of Andrei Rublev" (1982), "Metamorphosis" (1987), and other works with their active dynamics of diagonal structure, which serve as a fine demonstration of the essential properties of the sculptor's idea of plasticity.
1997 |