Alberto Pellegrini, Sagittario Gallery, Rome, 1995.

It is a great honour for me to present in our gallery such artist as Vasiliy Lozovoy. I think that my duty is to pay tribute to his arts.
His works that we are lucky to see first time in Italy are the examples of his many-years creative activity. Ukrainian by birth he lives and works in Kharkov.
His pictures are represented in many prestigious museums of the former soviet empire as well as they are published. He became the one of a few artists who had deserved an opportunity to exhibit abroad.
We can see and feel unprecedented might and spiritual power of his nation – physical strength that is trained by the intellect very often could not run out. This is a hard, often even a superhuman toil which the peasant is doomed to do… Clods of ploughed up fields seem to be the human wounds. Toiler is one-to-one with a heavy and severe reality working every day on the land to

wring the livelihood from it. I would describe his art as an art of surviving. His art is a self made space, a certain secret place where one can open his heart and find an outlet for this energy by means of a colour and a sign, expressing his individuality. As much as the air he breathes he needs this free space, which allowed to preserve for a long time an outstanding talent of this artist who hasn’t been well-known in the West till this time. Due to the political changes that happened last years the artist got an opportunity to compare his art with European ones. A lot of his European colleagues easily and comfortably cut themselves off classical cannons of art, enjoying their freedom of self-expression. Let be the witnesses of their reaction to the presence of a true artist. But if to say seriously I wonder more what Lozovoy will get from this European culture. Well, the die is cast. As for me personally I have any doubts in his success.

Cesare Caselli, San Benedetto del Tronto, 1995

You should be extremely careful when it is about being late in the art: ones could be late geniuses or useless avant-gardists. While Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism etc. already existed Monet still has been painting his Water Lilies.
But these amazing canvases are eternal and the best of he ever painted. This Toti Shaloy’a recent statement is right to estimate any kind of arts including Soviet art that was being squeezed within the frames of Social Realism.
It should be marked right away that besides official subject area many artists simultaneously were developing informal sphere including nature and portrait. They were filling their arts with personal feelings and confidential social truthfulness and certainly their arts exceed the canons prescribed by the regime.
Despite they followed Realism and were devoted to the form of representation, their arts are deeply expressive and filled with the great spiritual content which is indispensable to a real work of art.
Vasiliy Lozovoy should be mentioned among such masters. He is one of the leading Ukrainian artists, whose works are spread among museums of the former USSR.
Vasiliy depicts Ukraine that is contemporary to him, but he allows us to replunge into eternal, saint and unique environment of the peasant world, casting over the literature images by Gogol, Tolstoy or Scholokhov’s Quite Don, as Lozovoy and Scholokhov were tied with deep mutual friendship. Beauty of the peasant folklore, fertility of Ukrainian land, landscapes on which his painting manner and colours tremble in the manner of makyaels and post-impressionists.
 

Matter and light, there are the constituent parts of this art which synthesizes in itself all the principal components of great impressionists’ and post-impressionists’ works, even though it doesn’t renounce on Realism. In his luminous landscapes colour shining nears to Alfred Sisley manner, stilllife paintings are fruity and absolutely vivid like Sesan and Gogen do, renovated and full of light Monet’s colours are represented in many of his canvases. But the most impressive are the points of tangency with Italian artists of the XIX century and makyaels. Vasiliy manages to wring the mystery of shining from the colours as this shining is very typical for Impressionism: shadows brighten up with clarity, environment gets perceptible consistent materiality keeping its dynamism and inner awe. Lozovoy has got nothing static, even in so called «nature morte» (dead nature) everything pulsates with the inside life. We can see it both in his landscapes, especially from the Italian series that is full of bright Mediterranean light and in his etudes with such figures as Model in the studio or Seamstress… Nevertheless a lot of Russian artists walk this way such as Sedov, Dvorzhetskiy, including V. Lozovoy. Following post-impressionists, one can reach the highest peak of skill, using bright and ingenuous paints and condensing form as a state of mind. Side streets of Rome and Italian landscapes are full of this craving for sunny concreteness and curiosity which incite him to study every phenomenon, enabling to fill that was observed with wonderful shining. It is a search that turns into a historic romance living inside itself with the thousands other stories even though it was developing into an intimate tale.