Anton Solomoukha, Russian (1945 - )

  
Painter and photographer Anton Solomoukha was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1945, currently living in Paris, France. His works are mostly neoclassicist; Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis and more recently the bilboquet are recurring themes in his works. He graduated from the Fine Arts School of Kiev and left the USSR in 1978. Since then he has exhibited his work internationally, including exhibits in the United States (New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Washington DC), Germany (Cologne, Munich), and France (Paris, Lyon). He continues to live and work in Paris.

A founding member of the Ukrainian Nonconformists, Solomoukha established a reputation for his skill in integrating folkloric Ukrainian themes with contemporary elements. His experiments with surrealism and abstraction have produced canvases that explore myth and language in a visually compelling manner. The works on view in this exhibit show his shift to an expressionist style, while continuing his investigation of signs and symbols.

" The background of Solomoukha’s pictures seems to represent “depth” in the sense of “the depths of a barrel”, “the depth of the eyes” or, better yet, “the depths of a tunnel” and “the depths of ages”. Solomoukha’s depths are indeed characterized by a kind of ambiguity between surface and depth, as tough particles of matter, ash, still-burning lava and scorched, oxidized earth, had risen to the surface only to give a hinting perception of the distant flames from which they burst forth. […] Solomoukha’s backgrounds do not much evoke spatial depth as translate the depths of time. One is reminded of the walls of Rome, for example, whose colors, the many shades of ochre and soot-penetrated reds, the peeling layers of rough-rendered stucco, pigments weathered by the seasons, show us the workings of time. Time itself has washed over it in successive layers like a patina of varnish."

Jean-Louis Baudry, September 1990

" [In Anton Solomoukha’s] works, painting brings infinite seriousness into a reading of the world. He has known forever what he owes to death. The facets of destiny that brought him to life must have gone through the facets of history. And his painting with which he covers his own story, imbues the canvas with the intention of bringing the critical nature of a world that has been left behind forever. Paradox… The origins of Solomoukha, Kiev, Ukraine, his know-how which includes orthodox primitivism and inquisitive creation in the labyrinth of Glasnost, his rigorous painting studies, his adventures are so far from my knowledge and experience."

Michel Enrici, December 1999