Artwork Description
Igor Melnikov – Blossom
Dimensions: 38.25 x 54.5″ framed / 31.5 x 47.75″ unframed
Year: 2007
Medium: oil on panel
Igor Melnikov’s oil on panel work, Blossom, evokes synesthesia, whereby one’s ability to take in sensory information becomes interconnected, such that a sound might evoke a color or a smell a taste. Melnikov’s intricately layered hues is provocative of an experience that extends beyond the realm of the visual into the haptic and musical, suggesting the work’s ability to project itself beyond the confines of the panel. There is a surreal quality to the scene, as if the viewer has stumbled upon the inner workings of the artist’s mind or encountered it within a dream.
Russian born artist, Igor Melnivok, upends traditional associations with portraiture through his haunting and intrinsically psychological paintings of emotionally ambiguous children and within his subtle natural explorations. Rather than focusing on the individual identity of those within his works, Melnikov instead looks to viewers as dynamic participants in the interpretation of his paintings, allowing them to determine whether the children might burst into tears or laughter, based on personal experience, thought, and upbringing. Melnikov is fascinated with the simultaneity of happiness and suffering, which he believes function as an expression of the ‘complexity of the human personality’ and exist as a component of the ‘meaning of being’. Melnikov’s paintings are collage-like, yet not in the traditional, material sense of the process—instead layering his own psychological explorations onto his attempted understandings of the human condition and expression. While his muted color palettes might at first appear to be reductive, they instead focus viewers’ attention on the figures within the work and encourage slow and thorough readings of the detailing that remains visually available. While people and the human condition remain the primary subjects within his paintings, Melnikov also expresses an artistic concern for the natural world, whether expressed in landscape surroundings or in its more material and familiar manifestations, seen in the figure’s clothing and simple possessions.