Brushing Up on Russian Art

On some levels, the halls of the Kavli Theater make for a less-than-perfect venue for art viewing. The building is not an ideal gallery setting--the lighting could be better, and the viewing hours are erratic at best. In fact, viewing art here can retroactively stir up the controversy over the scrapped plans for an art gallery to be fitted into the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Center’s design in the first place.

That said, some fine art has graced these passageways, as anyone milling around during concert intermissions can attest. And none of the shows so far has been so important as its current exhibition of art from Russia. Specifically, these works by contemporary Russian artists come out of that venerable, and historically besieged, home of artistic strength, St. Petersburg, previously known as Leningrad.

Russia’s artistic legacy in the 20th century has been a hardy and tumultuous one, and one that has been largely kept from the curious eyes of the West. Important contributions to an unfolding modernism early in the century began to shrink from global view under post-Bolshevik censorship. Even since the Iron Curtain fell, art hasn’t filtered out of the area much.

That socio-historical backdrop alone makes this wide-ranging sampling of works, “Russian Resplendence: Masterpieces From St. Petersburg,” worth seeing. The work comes from the Edward Emdin Gallery in St. Petersburg, and the local connection was made through the good graces of Thousand Oaks Arts Commission chairwoman Jane Brooks, who met Emdin while in Russia.

Are these, as the title promises, masterpieces hanging on three floors of the theater’s hallways? Not by most standards, but what the show does deliver is a general strength of technique and conception, in work by artists aware of past models and with unflinching ideas of their own to add. We get a sense of the 20th century’s bank of art-world trends, filtered through sensibilities that are a long way from SoHo’s latest fashion.

Alexander Krylov’s still-life subjects, for instance, express an intriguing mixture of a prickly realist’s immediacy and odd, vaguely surreal qualities. His art seems to be about seeking out enchantment and profundity from the everyday. In one piece, objects on a shelf remind us of Giorgio Morandi’s work, while whimsicality crawls by in the form of a snail across a table in another.

Cubist thinking shows up in varying degrees, whether in generous doses in Anatoly Galb’s expansive abstract paintings, or in subtler ways in Vadim Kurov’s work. For Kurov, the prismatic patterning of post-Cubist imagery blends with new, envelope-pushing portraiture, as in a strong work like “Photo to Remember.”

Almost hidden in plain sight up on the third floor mezzanine level are huge paintings by Kurov, in which mythic figures are engulfed in fanciful, decorative backdrops.

There are unabashed traditionalists in the show, as well, including agreeably sentimental cityscapes by Cyril Malkov and Valentin Blynov, who also shows more stylized, amiably distorted imagery with echoes of Chagall. Igor Mayorov’s paintings of city streets have an airiness of gesture and a lightness of being that we generalize as being French in attitude, almost with the witty delicacy of Dufy. But that might be our own cultural typecasting at work: We think, too easily, of Russian artists as being heavy and serious.

Speaking of a French connection, the parallel universe of dancers--in rehearsal, onstage or backstage--is the chosen domain of Alexander Seymuk. While the link to Degas’ work is inevitable, Seymuk adheres to a more lucid, reportorial style, with a more true-to-life sense of being there and escaping the real world. In other art-referential news, Dimitry Polarouche pays direct tribute to Van Gogh in a faithful copy of his iris series, titled, humbly, “Van Gogh.”

The star of this show may well be Andrey Malkov, whose striking mixed-media pieces tell stories and evoke little visual worlds, often in modestly scaled proportions. His offbeat still-life subjects seem to emanate from somewhere between reality as we know it and the fertile soil of artistic imagination, as in “Pear,” its contours suggesting a cello. Malkov’s aesthetic is a deft, graceful one, with enough twists to keep us guessing, to up the ante of mystique.

Surrealism enters the picture in “Bench,” with a female figure with a rosebud head sitting on a large flat fish on a bench. It’s beautiful and straight out of a Magritte-ish dream. And “Lightning” is mythic and simple, harnessing, in a small artwork, the power of nature and the unpolished enigma of night in the country.

Whether or not this exhibition gives an accurate indication of the artistic energies from its particular corner of the world, it makes for fascinating viewing and speculation. What if, we ponder, Russian art had been allowed to continue its forceful Modernist agenda? In its own small way, the show offers us a chance to begin making up for lost time, checking in on a rich culture that has been thriving under wraps for decades.

DETAILS

“Russian Resplendence: Masterpieces From St. Petersburg,” through July 18 at the Kavli Theater, Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, 2100 E. Thousand Oaks Blvd. Call for viewing hours; 449-2743.