irises Print

Innokentiy Fateev is originally from Russia, Tomsk, a town in Siberia. From 2001 lives in Faenza, Emilia Romagna, where he attended ISIA, Higher Institute of Artistic Industries. The teachings of his father Yuri, also an artist, and the natural and cultural suggestions brought back to his homeland directed him towards a figurative painting that was first of a naturalistic-descriptive type. He is then influenced by protagonists such as David Hockney or Andrew Wyeth, through whom he overcomes certain initial limits, avoids the shallowness of a, by now anachronistic realism and moves towards a solid formula of the need of day to day painting. An instinctive painter, Fateev knows no precise thematic or iconographic limits. No symbolism is underlying a painting that could also be defined as happy: satisfied by the mere act of vision and recreation of reality. Flowers, natural and urban landscapes, still lifes and portraits are executed with great speed as a sign of an achieved executive mastery and a remarkable capacity for visual synthesis. There is nothing impressionistic, however, in Fateev which, on the contrary, tends to consolidate his images of reality in almost plastic and rubbery arrangements with unnatural color changes and accentuations. Even the debts towards a master like Edward Hopper are omitted: the subjects, the cuts of the image, the shots and the moments represented do not intend to rise to a symbolic value or induce particular reflective attitudes. Fateev's painting proceeds smoothly, almost naturally, and it is no coincidence that the artist defines his landscapes as "wet-scapes", liquid landscapes. An adjective that has nothing to do with a certain contemporary sociologism but, more fully, with a conception of the world as a huge ever-changing flux that the artist can help to firm and partially condense by recreating the rare and fleeting, such as the green ray , moments of intersection between everyday life and theatricality. In addition to the Faenza, Romagna and Italian sectors, Fateev has exhibited in Russia, Austria, Germany and Holland.