National Art Museum of the Rubublic of Belarus - PRESENT INFINITE of Vladimir Prokoptsov

PRESENT INFINITE of Vladimir Prokoptsov

From time to time an artist feels the necessity to stop, look around, and see what is done, think it over and align the course so that to move further. The exhibitions help him to sum up the achievements and receive answers to many questions.
In this respect the idea to organize the exhibition of Vladimir Prokoptsov “My Time” is an original and unusual art action. The author wants to show his work through the course of time which is free from the trite stereotypes and traditional rituals. The artist is a romantic at heart in spite of his official position and status which undoubtedly require certain pragmatism.
Painting is a way and an opportunity to show and to vent tensity of feelings and thoughts on canvas for the master. Vladimir Prokoptsov’s pictures are combination of subjective and lyric with rational and pragmatical elements. Vladimir is a many-sided personality. He combines important qualities of organizer and analyst, which give him an opportunity to build a composition, to fill it with sense; of lyrist and romantic, which devote emotions and warm-heartedness and help to put the whole soul into a picture.
Presented at the exhibition works are the evidence of the constant creative search and self-perfection. The artist expands his horizon; his art vision acquires features of versatility. Transient image, such as insignificant detail return us to the reminiscences about something half-forgotten, making us think over the deep sense of the natural phenomenon.
Coloured with nostalgia and retouched by rationality charm of half-forgotten notions about kind and sincere feelings, old and simple truths is revealed in romantic, at times sentimental pictures. Rarely the feeling of bitter disillusionment becomes evident in his works. However his compositions have little in common with moralizing, they are devoid of histrionics. The author prefers lyricism and sincerity.

The artist often works at landscape genre. He considers it is not a descriptive kind of painting where the details push essential things into the background. His painting is the echo of memory sounding in his pictures from time to time. Reality moves back and is seen through the haze of subjective sense for the master. He can derive substantial generalizations from the ordinary everyday sides of reality and make an emphasis on urgent problems of the present. The world of the distant childhood is recreated in his pictures as if in a dream. Here is the impress of idealization, simplicity and magic. The art language exposes the author’s play of fancy; it’s filled with hints and intellectual content.
Chronology is not important for Vladimir Prokoptsov’s creative work, though for the last ten years essential events in social consciousness, spiritual life and culture underwent changes. His poetic soul could not only preserve itself but assert itself in this vanity of changes. Own convictions were always important for Vladimir: he always preferred to keep distance between subjective world of creation and surrounding reality. The artist’s image, which is grown up from his works, is always important for us, spectators. Vladimir Prokoptsov’s pictures tell us much more about the time and the author’s personality as any verbal interpretations. Genuine person of the artist becomes apparent exactly in his works, as far as here he is the most spontaneous and frank. The master appears in his true character creating the invented world on the basis of reality, the world where his soul lives, the world which is filled with candid emotions and feelings.
The artist Vladimir Prokoptsov composes the unique melody of art which remains forever and will live through the ages. He turns over page after page of a fascinating book, the name of which is Art. One of the first pictures of Vladimir Prokoptsov is titled «PRESENT INDEFINITE» and this exhibition can be called «PRESENT INFINITY».

Valery Zhuk,
Doctor of Art History