Shimon Okshteyn: Before The Sun Splendor, 2012

“Shimon Okshteyn’s new paintings carry us through the conceptual and epistemological thicket, responding intuitively to the radically changed visual environment of the 21st century. Here we find an aesthetic that is deeply informed by and that responds to these shifting modes of representation, a material reworking of the very notion of the analogue in a post-digital age.”

“Okshteyn literalizes the original concept of the academie, using (digital) photographs as the sketchy starting point for his large paintings. The eccentric “unposed” poses of the models call to mind Degas’ famous series of similarly unconventional bathers. (It may be worth mentioning that in his own time, Degas was deeply interested in and engaged with photography as well.) In Okshteyn’s case he brings a finely controlled command of illusionistic painting (drilled into him in the early rigorous training he received in the USSR) to strategically deploy  – and in some ways recuperate – the skilled academic tradition, but in a productive new relationship with what might be thought of as the avant-garde of the 21st digital age.”  _________ Beth E. Wilson, Art Historian, NYC

Provenance:
Stux Gallery, NYC, 2013