Inkatov, Sergei
Sergei Inkatov, an Estonian artist of Armenian origin, produces original and immediately recognisable paintings, and is achieving increasingly widespread international acclaim. His work has proved highly collectable in Moscow and St Petersburg ......
SERGEI INKATOV
Sergei Inkatov, an Estonian artist of Armenian origin, produces original and immediately recognisable paintings, and is achieving increasingly widespread international acclaim. His work has proved highly collectable in Moscow and St Petersburg, and he has enjoyed successful exhibitions in Germany, Spain, Finland, Russia, USA as well as Estonia. The renowned and influential Russian Museum in St Peterburg has recently voted Sergei as one of the top artists of the 20th Century and 14 of his works are being published in their commemorative book. At 37 Sergei is firmly on his way to achieving great success.
Sergei Inkatov’s Easterm Cultural roots stamp his work with mystery and sensuality in the eyes of the European. What is more, his painting is conditioned by a romantic and festive philosophy of life. The vivid colours of the old part of Tallinn, in his urban landscapes, or in the rush of wind against the ships sails, in his seascapes. He has a predeliction for the crooked facades and narrow streets in the old part of Tallinn, the Estonian city he adopted as his own, his second homeland after Baku, where he was born an Armenian. Sergei’s father Vladimir, also a painter, taught him to reproduce the ancient architecture of his native city in watercolours, encouraged him to attend painting and drawing classes, and later to enrol in Baku’s School of Art.
As a result of military conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Sergei had to transfer to the Venitsianov School of Art in Tver, Russia. There he was able to learn the classical and realist painting tradition and steep himself in the creative heritage of the grand masters such as Isaac Levitan and Ilya Repin. It is through them no doubt, that Sergei developed his ability to capture on canvas the beauty of nature and its changes of light colour and rhythm. Following his academic education, having by then settled in Estonia with his parents, the artist straight away began to exhibit and entered the art market where his work was in great demand among foreign collectors.
The joy of living, the exaltation of life in all its colour and fullness, is the first thing one perceives in Sergei Inkatov’s pictures, whether the spectator is looking at a sunlit landscape, an old town, a still life or the most abstract composition.
On his trips abroad, the artist takes notes and makes sketches in which he captures the aroma and essences of cities such as Toledo, with its cobbled streets, and Strasbourg with its facades full of colour. In Sergei’s work, the architecture of the town’s old quarter is of special importance: houses with time worn facades lean over and hold each other up. The painter know how to choose just the right angle to create a focus in which space is narrowed down, the streets crowd in on each other ad the buildings are stretched, and the spectator is immersed in a wonderland where cities are built out of playing card houses that have red, blue and orange roofs.
His still lifes, southern in their forms and colouring are also outstanding. Inanimate objects, natures mortes, containing a pulse of life in every brush stroke. The citrus aroma of the lemon’s porous rind, the pomegranate smooth and shiny in its ripeness, and the infinite reflections in the glass of a jar are modelled with brushstrokes of colour and impressionist dabs.
In Sergei Inkatov’s canvases colour is the protagonist. Colour constructs the space, creates the atmosphere and guides the spectator’s gaze. The dynamic brushstrokes and the dense texture are at the service of colour. All his work represents a colourful, romantic mythology in which the ancient and modern converge, in which one finds the sun, the sea, the rush of the wind, passion, love and the joy of living
Galina Balashova -Art Critic- Lady Magazine March 2008
