Zadorine, Andrej

Andrej Zadorine’s paintings have much in common with photography, though there is a vitality breathing through Zadorine’s paintings that could never have been captured by a camera. With a warm poetic heart, the artist manages to convey someone’s personal identity and disposition in paint. This goes much further than outward resemblance. Sometimes, one need not even see the other’s face in order to recognize him. We recognize the attitude, the body language, and what some would call the “aura”. Zadorine faultlessly captures the signals from a glance or a posture and records them on the sensitive plate of his soul, and then “develops” these snapshots into a painting. The impression of an observation through a lens is heightened because he consciously makes his paintings resemble old photographs and stills from films: he scratches the half-dry paint of the picture with the back of his brush.

With a glowing, penetrating light, he takes us to his early youth in Minsk, to an atmosphere of silence in which the melancholy whisper of our own memories may be heard.

As early as his childhood years, Zadorine was fascinated by black-and-white illustrations of a few of Rembrandt’s paintings. The virtuoso drawing style, the theatrical mise-en-scène and the chiaroscuro of the great master enthralled him, even before he had ever seen a single colour of Rembrandt’s. It is then no wonder that just those three elements became the hallmark of Zadorine’s own work.