Person of week: Igor Nezhivoy — poet and artist, the occupant of squats and a little romantic
ARTinvestment.RU   03 марта 2020

Igor Inanimate rushed to art at sunset of the Soviet era and has created a vivid and distinctive world, antagonistic to the then reality. Turning to a stylistic search of the beginning of the twentieth century, from impressionism to avant-garde, he boldly operates their findings

Igor Inanimate had no professional art education in art led him to poetry, or rather, his friend — poet, musician and philosopher Terence Herbalist (Igor Arkadievich Alexeev). Since 1987, Igor Nezhivoy was a frequent guest at the Herbalist. Once Terence gave Igor two of his paintings, and some time later, Igor wrote his first canvas and gave Terence and his wife Oksana. It was a family portrait and write it from nature ("Terentiy Travnik and Oksana". 1988). The portrait is solved in an expressive manner, the images are very generalized, but at the same time recognizable. Twenty year old aspiring artist caught and passed the way of high spirituality, seen through the prism of the life and work of his friend. Later, Terence and illustrated a book of poems, Still, the author's copy which is kept in the archives of the Travnik.

In 1988, Lifeless acquainted with Andrey Karpov, became a disciple of his school of neo-primitivism. Inanimate called Andrey Karpov as his teacher and mentor, whose work is grateful the media has dubbed "intelligent naive", paying tribute to the humor and warmth in his multi-figure compositions.

After meeting with Karpov Inanimate began to work the squat in Furmanny lane in Moscow, there was held soon after his first exhibition. Squat evicted in the house of the Ministry of defence in furmanniy alley has existed since 1987-го to 1991. It was a special place, "unofficial" Russian art of the eighties. Here dwelt Yuri albert, Sven Gundlach, Vadim Zakharov, Konstantin Zvezdochetov, brothers Vladimir and Sergei Mironenko and Andrei Filippov. Were the followers of Moscow conceptualism, which was influenced by Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Andrei Monastyrsky, and others. And of course, being in this creative and trendy atmosphere, Lifeless "absorbed" all the details of her life...

Thus, it is possible to say that painting, creativity, and popularity burst into life Igor Inanimate in the late 1980-х, then he was a member of the famous squats and it was at that time born of its author, fascinating and exhilarating his sincerity naive style.

an event Igor Inanimate depicts of a bright arisen feeling, not based on the logic of knowledge. He builds narrative storytelling, recreating reality, but trying to repeat the spatial plans. So he built his own artistic world — bright, original, unusual for professionals in the visual structures and plots. Space in this — as a decorative plane on which are placed objects, characters, images in face and profile, combined with different angles of view. Bright drawing of his characters, he boldly deals with forms and scales of the characters in the space of art: "Street circus", "the piano tuner", "Morning of the Prelate".

the Researchers of naive art there are several main forms of interpretation of space on the picture plane:the system of orthogonal projections, encountered in the murals of Ancient Egypt and the Assyrian-Вавилонии; parallel perspective characteristic of the painting of medieval China and Japan and the countries of the East; reverse perspective in the art of Byzantium and Ancient Rus; video perspective developed in the Renaissance — and each of them resonates in the works of non-living.

In the late 1990-х — early 2000-х Inanimate moving toward more complex compositions, there are more details in the picture, more carefully studied the background of paintings: from neutral it turns into a fantastic (e.g., intricate thickets "Agave" or "Hunting for butterflies with a hanging bridge"). Appears the narrative. The combination of colors, their buoyant tone, the mood of the artist and the optimistic charges. His works often resemble stop-кадр, but inside paintings life does not stop — on the contrary, it exists independently of the viewer, which, like the window, looks into the unusual and fascinating world of the author ("the Flower market"). Probably here you can see the influence of impressionism, but the illusion of vibrating, the movable surface of the canvas, not an end in itself — is more likely to form.

In 2014, the exhibition "Defrag space" (Moscow, D. E. V. E. Gallery), the artist reveals a completely different side: he is seriously interested in cubism and abstraction, fell in love with a strict geometric shape. Despite the stinginess of visual techniques, the image in the "arrival of a train" has developed quite clearly. Cold rigor of linear perspective opposed to power and strength of the miniature train in the center of the canvas. The viewer feels the energy of this small mechanism, which appears with great force "exhale" a massive spherical cloud of smoke, rushing to the edge of the picture.

In the works beginning 2010-х more emphatic decoration. The composition is built on the synthesis of color planes, which cover all the surface, but the pattern never lost their rhythm ("lilac", "Lens").

Igor Still, of course, the artist's vivid personality, whose works occupied a worthy place in many collections around the world: Russia, Australia, Italy, Morocco, USA, UK, France, etc.

Alexei Smirnov