Alexey Krasnovsky 1945 - 2016

Alexey Krasnovsky - Harvest Moon, Oil on linen, 28" x 35"

​Alexey Krasnovsky, one of Jorgensen Gallery’s longest standing artists, sadly passed away recently in Dublin, a place that had been his home for the past twenty-five years.
 
Born in Russia in 1945, he studied painting in St. Petersburg at the Tavrichesky College of Art under the constructivist painter Alexander Pavlovitch Zaitev. In 1979 Alexey left Russia and emigrated to the United States, where he first lived in New York city before moving to Woodstock, New York. During this time he travelled extensively throughout the United States, Mexico, and Europe, before finally moving to Ireland.

Alexey Krasnovsky - Isla Tavira, Portugal, Oil on linen, 15.5" x 19.5"

Alexey Krasnovsky - Still Life with Russian Toys, Oil on linen, 35" x 39"

​Alexey had numerous successful solo exhibitions at Jorgensen Fine Art, as the gallery was previously known, his last being in 2014.

​Below is the catalogue introduction from that exhibition, written by Sile Connaughton Deeny.
                                 
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
 
W.B. YEATS
 
Colour, which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power… PAUL GAUGUIN
 
Colour is the language of this exhibition, at times the voice is loud and vibrant, the colour thickly and defiantly applied. At others it is sotto voce the colours pared-back and almost withheld. There is a divide between the earthly and the ethereal, the sensual and the spiritual. We are reminded of the raw sexuality of the work of Gauguin juxtaposed with the tender innocence of that of van Gogh. The earthiness of Billy’s Bay Jamaica, Hot Peppers and Still Life with White Onion is almost tangible. We smell the soil which nourishes the Chestnut Clarinda Park. As for Flying Squirrel and Cardinal Red, I think Gauguin would have been hard-pressed to convey such relish in Nature’s fecundity. In total contrast, the lighter, airier, more dreamlike works such as Gibbous Moon, Tavira Portugal, Conversation Collioures and, perhaps most especially, Moorish Castle Tavira are heartbreakingly tender and touching. They are the dreams that Yeats speaks of in his poem.
 
These works are laced with Alexey’s life experiences; he is in every brushstroke, every trope. He openly parades his emotions, cracking open the carapace to expose to us the tenderloin of his inner self. It truly behoves us to ‘tread softly’.
 
                                                                                                Síle Connaughton-Deeny, May 2014