Luminous landscapes

A central theme of Vassiliev’s art, exemplified by the poignant painting ‘The Last Stop’, is the complexities of memory; Vassiliev has described this as ‘the ghost of memory’. Allied to this is Vassiliev’s overriding concern with light; his self-styled ‘abstractionist’ works of the Sixties and Seventies were explorations of ‘the interactions between space-surface-light’. He masters light as though it is part of the very fabric of the surface on which he paints and draws, not as a tonal painter nor through the conventional use of chiaroscuro, which would lead to sharply diverging shadows and contours around forms.

Vassiliev’s understanding of light is used to extraordinary effect both in the coloured pencil drawing on canvas, ‘The Wild Flowers’, and the oil painting ‘The Last Stop’, an image of Moscow’s hinterland. Vassiliev’s images contain their own luminosity, so that the whole painting is itself the subject and expression of light. Even in the seemingly most colourful of paintings, such as ‘Churchyard’, and ‘Early Spring in the Country’ with its touches of deep red among the rain-washed mud ruts, colour appears distilled and abstracted. In ‘Early Spring/High Water’ we have the superb fusion of paint (titanium — the most luminous of whites available to artists) with pencil to create an ethereal world of mists and snow. Leaving the exhibition we are left with our own lasting impressions which linger, as in the artist’s own words, as the ‘living image’.