AS, “Angel,” 1994, 39in x 43in, oil on canvas
The intense colors in Andre Skripka’s Angel painting may not jibe with our typical ethereal angel visions, but the artist gives us exactly the more textured, brave perspective we need: that universal forces, beings, gyrations, shapes and emotional ignitions can be every bit as intense as the ones we expect from Hell. Here, Skripka shows us some syrup of watermelon and dark cherries and the rinds of blood oranges poured over that still-elusive angelic form. Angelic tomato sauce, if you get more of a sense of savory than sweet. The angel “smoothie” languishing down one’s gullet in order to reach the deepest of depths. Yet the slightly timid expression in the eyes, and then the raging blues and other juxtaposed colors and shapes take us to a very exciting Heaven, where angels dance and bump into each other and relish a chaos viewers rarely dream of as an environment of the afterlife. The artist knows this Heaven, for as a child he no doubt peeked from behind a settee and remembered the happy tumult he saw there. Text by Tova Navarra for James Yarosh Associates
The artist purposefully alters proportions, enlarging the heads and torsos, shortening the arms and legs of his personages. For he is not a copyist; he builds his own semi-fantastic, partly marionette-like world. His personages do not reproduce, but rather imitate, perhaps somewhat ironically at times, the behavior of real people. But it is they, who become the only reality in paintings by Skripka. “Real” life is put aside, becoming uninteresting and consequently, unessential. Both the personages and the “environment” of compositions and portraits by Andrey Skripka are equally significant: Space is not a background, but precisely an environment. It is like a red-hot furnace, where form, color and light are joined inseparably together. Figures and faces come to being here as if by themselves, experiencing the force of the space. Light and color do not “model form”, but overcome the inertia of material. In Skripka’s works the relation of space to form varies from painting to painting, from year to year. In his present works figures and heads are partly dissolved in space, merged into it. Occasionally, especially in portraits, the drawing is sharp and forms are modeled strongly and explicitly.
The tense, boiling deep down inside, space of his present works is their undoubtedly new and attractive feature. Inner tension is always perceptible in the artist’s contemporary works. Now and then his personages turn to look outward, breaking the inner space of the painting with a mysterious, questioning gaze, which will never be answered.
Many of the portraits and compositions by the artist are distinguished by their incompleteness, which, of course, is illusory and undoubtedly intended: as if the unfinished portrait “acquires form”, “merging” into the canvas, becoming firmly established in its space. Skripka maintains, that the world he has created is beautiful; he dresses his personages up gaily, inventing their fairy-tale and magical attire, and saturating it with color. Beauty is the only real foundation of this fragile, half illusory, half plaything world. But it is its justification, its hope and its salvation. Vladimir Zeltner ~Neo Shag catalog
Cat- The Egyptians’ enjoyment of “slinking” cats moves from Skripka’s concept as intelligent trepidation. Oh, this artist’s cat harbors centuries of knowledge of present, past, and future lives, but within the animal he places a periphery of swiftness--- like a sleight-of-hand--- and many an unidentifiable (thus mysterious) legend. Who knows where the lines will take us next? Follow that cat! Find that cat! Run under the bed of your dreams and fairy-tales and tempt the cat to come out and tell you why his delicacy exists. Skripka plays with the cat as the cat plays with him--- brushes and fine pens on a large field of white. Child-like and jumpy, the cat chases the viewers’ around as though they are the birds. And the chase is not a long or complicated one, though it is consciously and deliberately demented. Pink cat, pink cat, red is your jewelry, quite erasable are your outlines, but let us look at each other and discover oddities (in art) others may never notice. Text by Tova Navarra for James Yarosh Associates |
