Evdokim Perevalsky
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All the cities in the world

This most painterly of painters manages to undo all of the clichés about the species: he lives and works in one of the many neighbourhoods on the periphery of Girona (except for the Old Town, everything in Girona is peripheral) in a small penthouse that has gone, in the most natural way, from being a family dwelling to a work space and, what’s more, he works regularly and precisely, without frenzied outpourings or any considerable ups and downs. He is faithful to a conception of the kind of art that finds its best expression in a precise routine. Kim Perevalsky has lived and worked in Girona for sufficient years to know that things are not easy here either. He left his birthplace of Ukraine and has gone on a long curious voyage that has brought him to various cities around the world until, finally, Girona has captured him thanks to the semi-stagnant water of its rivers and other personal matters that we won’t go into here. Very near to the Parc Central, from the window in his studio, he can see a landscape that has nothing to do with what he paints: they are uninteresting buildings, neither especially pretty nor ugly; they are just functional, and faithful to their function as holders of people working at self-sacrificing production and voracious consumption. They are people in a neighbourhood that doesn’t exist in the sense that the majority only go there to sleep. Perevaslky must be one of the few who savours the calm once families have left their noisy children in the school “penitentiaries” and have started the arduous task of working so they can pay for leisure and mortgages; thus, it easy to imagine the artist imagining all of the cities in the world from the warm asepsis of his picturesque operating room.

The French philosopher, Edgar Morin, writes about the imaginary man, “Human individuality is affirmed at the expense of the specific instincts that become atrophied and the double is the spontaneous expression of this fundamental biological affirmation. Man’s biological reality […] produces a magical vision of the world, that is, the system of affective participations”.  The thinker of cinéma-vérité is certain that man is an imaginary being, not only due to cultural circumstances, but by biological imperative. We have to include in our definition the “natural” necessity of inventing doubles onto which we can project our affectivity. Chance or not, Perevalsky is, first of all, an artist who finds in splitting or doubling something a curious manner of explaining cities that he imagines and, in this regard, it is projected: in one of the images, the artist is seen split and doubled alongside a painting of a city, which is also split, due to the mirror effect of the water of the river that serves as its artery. The relationship between the man and the mirrored reflection is the same one as between the physical city and the sinuous image reflected back to us by the still liquid: one is static and receptive; the other is dynamic and a transmitter.

Only the reflection or mirage is real. Their “reality” exceeds ours in the measure that it is permanently updated; us, the artist, the stone city, we lose something because of the temporariness the image incorporates thanks to its changing nature. An image is a radical present and, at the same time, purely what is about to become. That is why Perevalsky paints buildings with an organic appearance, because he recognises himself in their shapes, because we recognise ourselves in them. The morphological importance of cities has been obviated too many times and only the domestic ambit has been insisted upon: cities understood as a sum of more or less individual houses and spaces is an organism that explains all of them. Everyone gets the city they deserve.

In any event, how can one explain that an artist of such impure shapes, aficionado of hallucinatory constructions, who likes the profiles of dramatic lights, twilights and soft round shapes, works in a laboratory? Only one option remains: a neutral environment is necessary for such singular spaces to take shape. Perevalsky’s temperament is that of one who has interiorized what he has seen and who only from a rested mind, ruminating on images, can give back in a painting a fraction of what has been lived. We said at the start that the most painterly of painters manages to undo all of the clichés about the species: he doesn’t need a studio conditioned by a whirlwind of scattered objects nor affected attitudes of existential suffering but rather by a handful of tools that he uses thanks to the intimate understanding of the profession. That is the only way to explain how the cities he paints could be every city in the world.

Eudald Camps

 

 


Photos by Pep Iglésias

 


Dream of the Slavic lycanthrope
Thanks to Perevalsky we now know that Bertrana, in reality, was a Slav. His Girona created based on nocturnal fragments and sordid scenes (hunchbacks aside) finds an unexpected image in the Rambla imagined by the Ukrainian. The blue hours are the time of necrophagic insects and of furtive expeditions in search of human food. Vampires or lycanthropes, assassins or involuntary victims of insomnia, know that it is the bluish light that separates the day from the night where they can find (and where they do in fact find) a suspended space where they can move about outside the crowds...
Eudald Camps

Eudald Camps

Bibliografia;
 

García Guzmán, Alfonso S. Ukraine. Seis pintores para el mundo, pp. 105-123, Estelfir S.L, Barcelona, 1997

  Artistas del 1999, Vicenç Coromina pàg.74, Barcelona, 1999
  Borrell, Miquel. Visions de Santa Coloma de Farners, p. 127, Santa Coloma City Hall, 2001
  Figuració 2000-2001, Tuset Gallery, pp. 24-25, Barcelona 2000
  Figuració 2002-2003, Tuset Gallery, pp. 28-29, Barcelona 2002
 

Perevalsky at Omnium Ars, Platja d'Aro, 2003

 

Catàleg de la subhasta del 50è aniversari de l’Associació Catalana Contra el Càncer, Barcelona, 2006

 

Ukrainian Art 1991-2003, Ukrainian Contemporary Art, p.307, The Ukrainian Artists’ Union, Mystetstvo Publisher’s, Kiev, 2003

  Art Fair catalogue, Eneida Publisher’s, Madrid, 2005
  Art Fair catalogue, Eneida Publisher’s, Madrid, 2006
  Art Fair catalogue, Eneida Publisher’s, Madrid, 2007
  Art Fair catalogue, Eneida Publisher’s, Madrid, 2008
  Lineart Fair catalogue, International Art Fair, p. 362-363, Ed. Flanders International Trade Fair, Ghent,(Belgium), 2005
  Lineart Fair catalogue, International Art Fair, Ed. Flanders International Trade Fair, Ghent, (Belgium), 2006
  Lineart Fair catalogue, International Art Fair, p. 238-239, Ed. Flanders International Trade Fair, Ghent,(Belgium), 2007
  Marb Art catalogue, International Art Fair of Contemporary Art, Marbella City Hall, pp. 100-101, 2005
  Marb Art catalogue, International Art Fair of Contemporary Art, Marbella City Hall, 2006
  Marb Art catalogue, International Art Fair of Contemporary Art, Marbella City Hall, 2007
  Marb Art catalogue, International Art Fair of Contemporary Art, Marbella City Hall, 2008
  Inart catalogue, International Art Fair of Catalonia, Girona, 2005
  Inart catalogue, International Art Fair of Catalonia , p. 74, Girona, 2006
  Andriy Chebykin exhibition catalogue, recent work and school, p. 129, Published for The Ukraine National Art Museum in commemoration of the artist’s sixtieth birthday, Kiev, 2006
 

Evdokim Perevalsky catalogue, Omnium Ars Gallery, Platja d’Aro, 2007

 

Camps, Eudald and Pep Iglésies, Projeccions. Interiors amb artista, pp. 118-123, Caixa de Girona Foundation, Girona 2008

 

Camps, Eudald and Pep Iglésies, El centre, despertar il·lusionat, Girona Shopkeeper’s Association, 2008

 

Valvi Foundation, Noves xilografies Gironines de 10 artistes, Girona 2009.

 

copyright Evdokim Perevalsky info@perevalsky.com 2009