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IN THE FEVER MUSEM By Barnaby Conrad III
If you look at art by day, it is not unusual for painted images to reappear in your dreams. One feverish night I dreamt that I was sailing through a half-lit museum in an unknown European city which was sinking into the sea. I floated from room to room in a small boat, while the crumbling walls sank into an apocalyptic bouillabaisse. The soulful portraits of Rembrandt, the haunting war scenes of Goya, the tormented figures of El Greco-these great pictures would be lost forever unless rescued from their golden frames. When the bubbling brew bore my dinghy near a Velasquez portrait, I plucked it from the wall. To my horror, the paint slid syrup-like off the canvas, dripping into the dark waters. The image was lost. I awakened perspiring, relieved to be free of the nightmare, but left with a sense of loss and helplessness. When I first saw Valentin Popov's paintings they gave me a shock. The art had a fetishistic splendor that astounded the eye and confounded the mind. Here again, it seemed, was that melting museum of my dream. Ghostly miniature images of Rembrandt, Brueghel, and Russian icons blossomed from the umber canvases. At first glance I wondered if they were reproductions glued onto the canvas-a typical shortcut for modern collage artists. No. Each vignette was exquisitely painted in trompe l'oeil-an astonishing tour de force of rendering. This Ukrainian artist not only was playing with a full deck, he had painted every card himself. Here was an artist with the skill of an academic master and the satirical eye of a post-modern comedian. Popov's work might be called Neo-Renaissance Abstract Pop, and the paintings combine modern collage elements with a graphic flourish that draws on 500 years of international art history. This is a bully brew of Rembrandt, Bosch and Brueghel swirled by the modern egg-beater of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. A well-educated modern artist today knows all of art history, from cave paintings to realism to cubism and abstraction. Why shouldn't he use it all? Popov does so in a way that makes us wonder at the dark currents that run through the phantom museum of human experience. His art is full of laughter, pain, and fevered memory. |