Light, impetuous, inspired movements of a brush – true lines which are committed to paper so fast and so precisely that you involuntarily start to think that the artist must be a magician. “The images create themselves, I only accentuate them,” he explains. Alexey Poyaganov has a special technique using water-colours, wax and a drawing-pen, whereby he first sets rhythms and then stains a wet paper with colours. He paints without any preliminary sketches as he considers it boring to create a painting by copying from a completed design.
     Alexey Poyaganov was born in 1950 in Gorky (now called Nizhny Novgorod) and graduated with honours from the Gorky Arts College in 1976, having attained a qualification in teaching art. However, he did everything in his power to avoid a career in teaching because he wanted simply to be an artist; or, rather, an artist-cartoonist, because he draws at lightning speed.
     Alexey came to St. Petersburg by pure chance. In 1978 he was on his way to Kamchatka, called by the unsoiled landscape with its beautiful geysers, and in passing he happened to stop in St. Petersburg. Many things about the city appealed to him: the atmosphere of the cultural capital, where life moved fast and bristled with expectation at every turn; the treasures of the Hermitage and the Russian Museum, which filled him with awe; the romanticism of an artist’s life in the Soviet times, when it was necessary to hide from the authorities and when underground exhibitions were overseen by the Committee of State Security; the artistic circle that gathered in the Centre of Contemporary Art at Pushkinskaya 10… All this drew Poyaganov tight into St Petersburg society, so much so that he decided not to leave and still lives here today.
     The way an artist views the world is always unusual; when he (or she) sees it, he is not simply a person, but an observer of people. In the constant flow of life Alexey is constantly presented with new faces which he subjects to his artistic operations; like a surgeon, he cuts off all superfluous details and creates the sharp edge of a face, deleting the ears and hair, to achieve the maximum expression. Poyaganov has been developing a series of masks since 2001 and it’s impossible to calculate how many masks he has already drawn, because in one painting there might be five or ten masks at the same time. It may sound grotesque, but the exaggerated features of the masks are so expressive that they overshadow the faces around them.
     The perception of life as a game came to Alexey in the years when he worked at Lenfilm as a stage designer. At the end of the 70s he succeeded in making films with the famous Russian film director Alexander Sokurov, but soon realised that he wanted to work not for film, but for himself. The artistic part of his soul begged for self-expression; he wanted to embody on paper the ideas which were boiling inside him.
     Poyaganov’s creative work involves the continual development of eternal themes such as Adam and Eve, Bible stories, angels, and Don Quixote. He also shows the eroticism of a woman’s body in his multiple nudes, and the beauty of a man’s body in his portraits of antique heroes like Samson, Hercules and Odysseus. His creative energy is very fierce. “When the creative urge attacks it is as if something bursts open inside me, and I draw a lot very quickly until I am completely exhausted,” admits the artist. “Then a new wave of inspiration comes and again I want to fly into my work, into my creative dream, forgetting about myself”.
     Since 1987 Poyaganov has been actively participating in exhibitions. These include an exhibition at the Dyagilev International Centre in the Marble Palace in 1990, and one in the St. Petersburg Museum of Ethnography in 1992, as well as exhibitions in Stockholm and Tokyo. Poyaganov’s works can be found in private collections in the USA, England, France, Finland, Japan, Greece, New Zealand, Denmark, Sweden and Russia.
     For additional information you can contact the artist by e-mail: Poyaganov@yandex.ru