Everything begins with a landscape
Elena Yureneva / art historian
"The Tenth Painting Exhibition of Twenty Moscow Artists". / 27 March – 30 April 1987
In my art everything begins with a landscape, says Yuri Mironov.
Nature as the origin of creation
Indeed, for Mironov nature is the beginning of all beginnings, with its own logic of development, its own laws, which hold sway over man as well. To these laws, more sensed than rationalised, the artist submits unquestioningly in his daily life. It is in the merging of his path, his destiny, with the general course of the universe that he draws the rational necessity of his being. Such a philosophy of life allows him endlessly to refine his sense of the surrounding world, to absorb its various states, and to respond to changes within it. And creation itself becomes an endless reflection on the realities of the surrounding world.The search for harmony is another facet of Yuri Mironov's work, and it is precisely because of this that we may call him a romantic.
Mironov chose the landscape genre as the only possibility for expressing a state, a mood, attuned to the natural world. This is why, among landscape painters, he feels closest to Turner, who captivatingly conveys the inner life of nature, able to bring his own personal experience into the nature he depicts without disturbing its wholeness.
Early experiments and painting technique
The artist considers 1977 the beginning of his path in art, when he became a member of the Moscow United Committee of Graphic Artists and gained the opportunity to take part in exhibitions on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street.
"Still Life". 50×40 / hardboard, mixed media / 1980
The earliest works (among them the "Still Life" of 1980 shown here) were executed on hardboard in mixed media. Working with an airbrush and emulsion dyes produced unpredictable, unexpected effects, lending these pieces an abstract character. With a splinter or scrap of wood the artist would only touch things up here and there, introducing elements of logic into the world taking shape before his eyes. At this stage, technique was, in a sense, more important than the result. Before long this dependence ceased to satisfy Mironov, and he began introducing into his paintings elements of more complex organisation, of a definite structure: real objects, such as a candle, spheres, and so on. Now the environment increasingly became a landscape, acquiring ever more definite features. Such are the works "Landscape with Spheres" (1979), "Constructive Landscape" (1980), "Candle" (1980), and others.
This is not a transformer of the world, but rather a subtle contemplator, a romantic, a lyricist.
From hardboard to canvas
Gradually Mironov devoted more attention to the environment itself and to the painted surface. Hardboard gave way to canvas, and the artist began painting with a brush. The unpredictable effects disappeared, and the picture was now built according to the artist's will. This handmade quality, which emerged as a solution to new tasks, insistently dictated a traditional landscape form. Mironov not only values reflection but draws from it a multitude of meanings and sensations; he is never at odds with himself. The existence in the world of the inexplicable and illogical attracts him with its mystery, and he strives to convey this wonder to the viewer. A sense of the "naturalness of wonder" pervades his works "Emergence", "Recollection", "Landscape with Spheres", and others.
"Emergence". 80×100 / hardboard, mixed media / 1979
Both the depiction of the real world and its unresolved, romantically unspoken quality are palpable.
For this reason these works are often viewed either as illustrations of a cosmic or science-fiction theme, or as evidence of the existence of unidentified objects, extraterrestrial beings, or civilisations. Nor is there in his work any pronounced ecological orientation. For the artist, the works of this period represent a search for the interaction between plane and space, object and the ambient play of light and air. The creative achievements of the late 1970s and early 1980s were summed up in the polyptych "Awakening" (1986). It records both the moment of the world's genesis, carried over from the period of the water-emulsion technique, and the logic of constructing a real landscape, which arrived together with the technique of oil painting.
"Awakening". 320×220 / oil on canvas / 1986
The painting "Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow" (1987, Yaroslavl Art Museum) is of particular interest. The dialectical process of creation and destruction became a new theme here. This is almost the only work by Mironov to take a cultural myth, the Tower of Babel, as its point of departure. One notices how freely and artistically the artist uses colour, and how unconstrained he is in constructing space.
"Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow". 130×100 / oil on canvas / 1987
He discovered the joy of creation.
Landscape and Tonal Transitions
And yet he is troubled by a certain literariness inherent in the works of this period. An attempt to move towards a different stylistic approach, to abandon narrative and ambiguity, is visible in the canvas "Dry Tree" (1985). From 1982 onwards the artist paints only on canvas and only with a brush. This suggests that the role of observer, of contemplator, no longer satisfies him. Not baroque multicoloured richness, but the borderline quality of subtle tonal transitions becomes his chief pictorial concern. The mood is nuanced, though it does not lose its romantic colouring.This is the most "landscape-oriented" stretch of all the periods in Yuri Mironov's work. It is no accident that it is precisely then that a number of works appear in which points of contact with Aivazovsky, Levitan and Turner are palpable.
The second half of the 1980s presents us with an artist who has revealed himself in a departure from the traditional landscape structure, though without breaking with it entirely. The works "Misty Shore" (1988), "Shore" (1988) and "Glon" (1988) demonstrate the author's inner freedom, even wilfulness, in the unexpected artistic gesture of a coloured trace upon the canvas. Free white and red brushstrokes complicate the structure.
How far Yuri Mironov has come in these works from his earliest experiments, in which a dependence on materials, technique and tradition was so palpably felt!
How far Yuri Mironov has come in these works from his earliest experiments, in which a dependence on materials, technique and tradition was so palpably felt!
"Glon". 100x80 / oil on canvas / 1988.
If previously it was enough for Yuri Mironov to find a pictorial equivalent for a state of nature, now every sound, every combination of sounds, must have its own visible image.
A Visible Image of Sound
The work "Glon" (1988) clearly marks the beginning of some new period. And just as Velimir Khlebnikov builds a poetic image upon non-semantic sound structures, Yuri Mironov attempts to create a pictorial equivalent for the combination of sounds "Glon", enigmatic to the viewer but entirely real for the artist.It seems that the artist is not in the least burdened by the subtle, borderline colour region that he has discovered for himself today. Accustomed to trusting his sensations and to verifying them through art, it is natural for him to follow his associations, his half-real visions, and thus inexhaustible in his work.
The further evolution of his work is unpredictable: he is inclined towards decisive changes of "course". But one thing may be certain: the organic nature of every change of style, the fundamental groundedness of every one of his innovations.
Elena Yureneva.
Art historian.
1993.
Elena Yureneva.
Art historian.
1993.
