[From across the room], the first encounter with the works foregrounds colour. Using a palette borrowed from history, Kononov’s pigments share a mattness akin to a Balthus and the same vibrance of an Italian Proto-Renaissance master (think: Martini, Duccio, Giotto). The seven works in Companions straddle realism and icon painting. Mundane moments of reprieve are haloed by luminous colours. Despite their richness, the paintings are muted and dusty, as if recently unearthed. Kononov employs classical shades of green umber, yellow ochre, and cadmium red in such a fashion that the subject’s tinge of modernity isn’t immediately noted. A few clues (clothes, faces, poses) give it away, but by and large, the paintings are temporally ambiguous. The palette is at odds with the works’ contemporaneity, camouflaging the figures in antiquity.
The contemporary edge which vaguely dates the work doesn’t negate the timelessness of the subject’s feeling: they exhibit something eternal. Fleeting feelings of youth are crystallised on the canvas. Fragility, ego, love and lust, violence, melancholy, and desire are sensed through their contemplative faces. The bodies are charged with movement; they are in the midst of an embrace or strangulation, in between turning over in bed. They are frozen in fraternal, carnal, or solitary engagements, preserved on the canvas like a photograph or a David.
[From up close], an otherwise realist paint application is made into a delicate lace by white, rough grooves of canvas which pierce through the image. Kononov’s neo-pointalism never fully fills the frame, despite extending right to the edge. The tooth of the ground beneath it is revealed; the painting appears moth-eaten. Upon closer inspection of the naked surface peeking through, materiality is foregrounded, and with it, a tapestry of small gestural marks, individually attended to. What was from afar a decadently replete painting is now revealed to be an image somewhere between materialising and dematerialising, weathered canvases shedding flecks of pigment, warding away any suspension of disbelief as if to acknowledge the briefness of the moment, the impermanence of the feeling on the figure’s faces.
It is the subject matter that coaxes the viewer to come closer in the first place. The intimacy of the scene unfolding on the canvas is as if peering through a window from out on the street – a little glimpse into an interior life, banal and tender. The subjects look away from the viewer, earnest and unaware of their presence. The works reflect intimacy and interiority with each brushstroke.
Sergey Kononov’s debut UK solo show Companions is on at Jeremy Scholar through 19 December 2024.
