© Neva time 10 January 2012
Monsters can be good people
Petersburgers were able to get acquainted with the work of the banned in Soviet times zhivopistsamistika Constantine Yanov
Vpersonalnoy exposition deployed at the Exhibition Center SaintPetersburg union of artists, presented works of small size, mostly 20x30, where mystical stories are interwoven with the dream and reality. That old man in the other world, the ancient hero fight with a dragon, here is a portrait of Helena Blavatsky, attends a spirit in the form of strange birds, here Nezlobnaya devils lurk behind the men, and even perched on his head, but the Gospel story of Christ's birth. Complete the painting in one color - warm ocher, green, all creatures and objects blurred outlines - the style, manner, shades the artist did not change over 30-40 years.
- Dad took subjects for his works of dreams - says the artist's daughter Elena peterburzhenka Janov, which has managed to preserve the legacy of the most father. - Its main task was to fix their vision, I think, in these colors, they came to him and. I remember Dad always with a brush, which he usually washed to the ground. I enjoyed it that came to hand - gouache, watercolor, often coal, pencil, drawing mostly on paper due to the lack of canvases. I decided to include in the exhibition blockade several of his drawings - black and white, on scraps of leaves. He made them practically dying of hunger.
Konstantin Pavlovich Yanov was born in Poland in 1905 in the family inzheneraputeytsa lived in Vlotslavske, Warsaw. Family in the 1914m moved to St. Petersburg, where the bones identified in school and in the evening drawing classes, which he graduated as an external student and 15 years enrolled in the Academy of Arts. Midsummer was not only the youngest student, but also one of the best, most interesting - so spoke of him his classmates artist Anatoly Kaplan and Alexander Traugot. Yanov perfectly mastered academic methods and drew him in an entirely different area - surrealism. Perhaps Konstantin influenced creativity storyteller Hoffmann, whom he began to get involved more in Poland. Yanov did not join in the end neither to the right nor to the left, he developed his own, unlike any other whose handwriting.
Elena K. says:
- Academician Arkady Rilov, author of the famous landscape "Green Noise", somehow, going to the Pope, said: "Well, as always amused? But talent! Keep up the great work". Dad was an incredible storyteller, and in life. I was brought up in a very strange story - for a good Hippo and disgusting people. Hippos and crocodiles in the father's tales no one ate, but rather saved. The Pope said that the monster can be naive and kinder than the world of people, he believed that our world upside down. And I tried to turn it back in the right direction. Often, he succeeded.
A strange and incomprehensible world Yanov frightened nomenclature figures. And because any citywide solo exhibition during his long life (he died artist in '91) did not take place, except minivystavok in the Cinema House and the studio "Lennauchfilm", where he worked as a painter and then director.
Constantine Yanov his mysticism, reluctance to move towards social realism escaped Stalin's repressions, most likely because that seemed to be a man not of this world, whose eccentricity is too conspicuous and therefore seemed innocent. At the same time he was a very responsible and reliable in the work, by nature good-natured and naive man. In one case, the house of the Janov climbed thieves, he took them for their grandchildren and friends began to show them their works, and finally presented the figures.
Janov was foreign conjuncture, even in everyday life, in everyday communication. He never tried to sell their work, but wanted to be seen by men. Finally the time has come. The exhibition demonstrated how the artist struggled with the chaos of the world, proving that light that emits a person in the afterlife, it is identical to that which emanates from him in the earthly life. For Janov world - what we think of it, not what we see. The works, which are so distant day came to the audience, Yanov convinces the world - this is our feeling that important matter.
// Elena Dobryakova
