VALERY YERSHOV

In a recent article, Review Magazine noted that public taste for old-fashioned, representative surrealism had been renewed. That being said, Valery Yershov’s “magnificently detailed mad-house paintings of intimate apocalyptic splendor” have made a timely arrival.

Valery Yershov reacts to cultural changes by painting a dreadfully detailed material world of expensive décor, in which aboriginal mascots and feral dogs invade elaborately furnished parlors. Valery was born on 1960 in the Soviet city of Yessentuki, and graduated from the Graphics Department of the Leningrad Pedogogical Institute. He moved to Moscow in 1987, and then to Stockholm in 1988. Before immigrating to America in 1991, he took part in exhibits in Russia and Europe, and London Contemporary presented a one-man show of his works in Moscow. He has had one-man and group exhibits in New York and other US cities, and his work has been sold through the auction house Philips of London.

A former member of the “association“ of underground artists of Furmanny Pereulek in Moscow, Valery has emerged as an established artist who has created something of a “Silken Paradise” for himself. At the end of the 1980’s, however, one could hardly have called Valery’s existence a paradise. He had nowhere to live, and selling his work without being a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR was an incredibly difficult task. Valery’s frustrations gave rise to expressionistic canvasses in which distorted mutated characters melt into each other and turn into abstract medusa-like creatures.

But when Valery moved to the Furmanny Pereulek district in Moscow, he found himself at the heart of alternative artistic live. During the Perestroika years gallery owners from around the world came to cultivate the first seedlings of the Russian art market, and Valery first learned the art market’s new rules: to survive, artists must be recognizable and produce.

Valery, like many of his colleagues, decided to meet the challenges of a capitalistic art market by trying his luck abroad. But expressionism, abstractivism and sensationalism as he created them were not at first appreciated, and he returned to the old traditional realistic system of which he thought he had so thoroughly rid himself. In America, his lush, realistic still lives sold like hotcakes; everyone admired the wonderfully outlined silks and velvets, the cushions scattered about on carpets, the glittering of gilded kitchenware and polished furniture.

Valery had made his niche, and he eventually garnered enough success that he could again exercise his creative gifts. He began painting interiors stuffed with all sorts of odd things; an absurd world where classicism met with Pop culture. Taking real objects out of everyday life, he manipulates them to build his “Silken Paradise”. Valery traces out museum and palace halls displaying masterpieces of antiquity, renaissance or modern times with the accuracy and realism of photography. But the action that takes place in these environments is surrealistically absurd. Dogs in uniform and monkeys in evening dress walk among the luxurious interiors, clamber over the antique sculptures or hang from them upside down by their tails. Dali could have envied Valery’s wild imagination.