Noon

Andrey Belov • "Real time" series
Canvas, oil. 140 × 190

The pictures from the series “Real Time” (2012?2018): “Zero time”, “Sunrise”, “Midday”, “Sunset”, “Night” - are probably the most balanced among Andrey Belov’s works. They contain more light, more hope. As compared to the monochromaticism of earlier works, based mostly on the dramatic contrast of light and shadow (bright rays of light like a lightning strike take the fragments of faces and torsos of the artist's tragic heroes out of darkness), in this series Belov submerges in the spatial heat haze of light, air, color.

Resembling impressionists, but pursuing different goals and using a different brushwork, he paints the same motif and, changing the coloristic solution, fills it with various feelings, states, images. It is not a specific landscape, it is rather some metaphysical space associated with the space of a human soul. Here we perceive the purity of an incipient new life — a new day, a new time, here the rustling refreshing rain is falling down and the sun rays are striking through the thickness of clouds, here the irrationally cold light, resembling the moon light, is slightly chilling one's heart and raising the soul.

The project “Real Time” keeps working out the mainstream ideological line of Andrey Belov’s art — resistance to the standardization of a human personality. The problem is described from an unexpected perspective – the artist dedicated his work to the theme of an “individual handwriting” in the broadest sense of this phenomenon: an individual handwriting of different cultural and language systems in the space of the modern world, an individual handwriting of the Artist, a handwriting of an ordinary person in everyday life. Belov considers this theme very important and acute due to the fact that today many national languages face the danger of extinction being involved in the process of worldwide globalization. Digital technologies marginalize classical handmade arts in the context of modern culture; we practically stopped using handwriting, which is one of the main elements of human individuality.

Olga Kovalenko,
Art History PhD