Evgeny Dedov is a Russian artist based in Vienna. The works of Evgeny show us a completely new perspective of the artist on the world around him, or rather not a perspective, but an attempt to communicate and interact with reality. He limits the motifs to a set of basic colour dots and reduces colour contrasts to a minimum, replacing them with a subtle, phosphorescent haze. His works, best viewed from the periphery or inner vision, immerse the viewer into a meditative state.
Works of art today deactivate their sources. Images arise in abundance, they do not need an occasion to illustrate certain channels of information. They need to be stopped, frozen, in order to regain the quiet power of the static and to resume a state of contemplation. Illustration and photography rely on the familiarity of the actual set of things around us. The actual objects, the referents, disappear, and with them much of the immediate neurotic effect. Painting can anchor the thing forever in the neurons.
In the ASASD series, corporeality becomes the focus. As if blowing an air kiss to Georgia O'Keeffe, Dedov paints orchids in a scale and size that transform them into fragments of struggle or coitus captured by a tabloid photographer. These are certainly not erotic works or chronicles of crime.
Evgeny graduated from the Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design in St Petersburg and was enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he acquired an excellent painting technique. His recent exhibitions include Fifth wave, a special project of the 2nd Triennial of Contemporary Art at Garage in Moscow and a solo exhibition Spinning, at Gallery Sternstudio, Vienna.
