“My soul is groaning and grasping for larger scales, to take materials and bathe in paints, to disperse them and feel a symphony of colours and images,” says the artist Alexey Poyaganov.
     The style of Poyaganov is very peculiar. The artist has a special technique that employs water-colour, wax and a drawing-pen. First he sets rhythms and then he stains a wet paper with colours. At this stage “the images exude themselves, I only accentuate them,” says the artist. Impetuous strokes strike down on the paper with precision and speed. Ambiguous lines somewhere run, somewhere blur. Poyaganov rarely works with a finished plot and never works with sketches, for it is too boring. The conception is born itself in the process of the work.
     There is always an extrasensory aspect to creative work. You can see it clearly in the drawings of Poyaganov where people are depicted with light around them, as if the eye of the artist could see their aura. Alexey confessed that he has always been stirred by the wish to see what is beneath the surface of the physical world and to grasp the essence. The artist states that “the moment of a creative peak you feel enlightened, this is when the insight is coming”.
     Poyaganov can work for hours, painting and painting, sometimes doing a series of 12 works in one day, until he gets drained. However, after this exhaustion a new wave of inspiration always comes and again the artist wants “to fly into his work, into his creative dream, forgetting about himself”. “You and the paper, you live in this, in this creative process, you approach your dream, it’s a great elation,” says Alexey.
     The main themes of Poyaganov’s works are masks, biblical motifs, the heroes of Ancient Greece and of course the artist can’t stay indifferent to the beauty of a woman’s body. Alexey has a series of nudes made with Indian ink and a drawing-pen that reminds one of Japanese art. The series “Masks” has been developed by the artist since 2001. The theme “all the world’s a stage” is very close to Alexey, who worked as a set designer at Lenfilm studios in the end of 70’s. One painting can have from four to twenty masks in order to reach the maximum level of expressiveness, to show all the possible nuances of different moods. Masks with omitted details emphasize the facial features and are even more striking than live faces. Adam and Eve, Angels, Don Quixote – these are eternal subjects, and Poyaganov returns to them again and again.
     Alexey Poyaganov was born in 1950 in Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod now). Since childhood, when a pencil turned out to be in his hand and he saw a sheet of paper becoming alive, drawing has become his destiny and his life. In 1976 he graduated with honours from the Gorkovsky Arts College and in 1978 moved to St. Petersburg. His first exhibition was organized in 1987. Since then many exhibitions of Poyaganov have been held, including at the Dyagilev International Centre in the Marble Palace in 1990 and in the St. Petersburg Museum of Ethnography in 1992. He also took part in exhibitions in Stockholm and Tokyo. The works of Poyaganov can be found in private collections in the USA, England, France, Finland, Japan, Greece, New Zealand, Denmark, Sweden and Russia. Poyaganov’s art was exhibited in the catalogue “Interferences,” published in Riga in 1992. His biography and creative path became the subject of the article “Break to Freedom” in the “Nevsky Vestnik” newspaper.
     For additional information you can contact the artist by e-mail: Poyaganov@yandex.ru