Peculiar properties of the artistic strategy of the Saint Petersburg artist Vic (V.Yu. Zabelin)

Abstract

The article gives a general description of the main aspects of the creative method of the Saint Petersburg artist Vic, an attempt is made to introduce a wide range of the artist's works into scientific circulation. Vyacheslav Yuryevich Zabelin (1953–2016) was an active participant in the Leningrad underground of the 70s and 80s: he founded the Alipiy creative group, was one of the founders of the TEII (Fellowship of Experimental Fine Arts) and the first independent Saint Petersburg galleries. The goal is to highlight the features of Vic's artistic strategy, located at the intersection of traditional, avant-garde and contemporary art. To achieve this task, a method of iconological, formal and comparative analysis is proposed based on the works of different periods of the oeuvre. The article reveals the nature of the artist's use of the symbolic system, which is based on Christian symbols, characteristic of non-official artists of the late Soviet period. The main ones are “apple”, “fish”, “light”, “dove” and “chalice”. Further, the method of connecting different motifs in the space of a painting canvas is analysed, which is based on the collage technique. A range of works is outlined in which Vic directly uses heterogeneous inclusions. Among the most characteristic are clippings from newspapers and magazines, playing cards, banknotes, photographs and reproductions of paintings. Based on the analysis, the authors put forward a hypothesis about the influence of collage technique on the method of compositional construction of pictorial works. Consideration of the symbolic system and the collage method in the works of Vic allows us to confirm the opinion repeatedly expressed by various researchers about the multidimensionality of the artist's view. The results obtained open the way for a further more detailed study of Vic's work.