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Artistique is inspired by old photographs of dancers such as Ruth
St Denis, Isadora Duncan, Mata Hari and Josephine Baker.
Having been living in India for a year, one of the dances I looked at
the most was the Baharata Natyam, where facial expressions change.
I want a flavour of late Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century
Paris, which was the cultural centure of Europe.
However in the Twenty-first Century, all this has finished. Impermanence?
Whilst having a conversation with Jim, I asked him why all this had stopped.
He simply answered: When a city gets rich, it stops.
I interpret this as wealth ruling out the element of risk, as why should
the wealthy take risks? Bad news for the artists...
However, fragments, ie old films and photographs, remind us of the past.
It was these things that brought me to produce Artistique.
Maybe it was nostalgia; because in the end, even though I was not there,
I thought of a Paris that could not keep still.
Looking at old photos, you wonder who were these people? Idle curiosity?
Or the fact that nothing is really lost forever?
Andrew Radkowsky
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Andrew Radkowsky is a painter whose cultural and artistic background
has been varied and turbulent, and this is the key to interpreting his
work. A few words to describe this background: his father was a Ukranian
refugee who fled to England at the end of the Second World War, and his
mother is an Italian who, like many others, went to find work in the north
of England. Andrew was born in 1963 and his early years, until 1987, were
spent in Yorkshire and Newport, South Wales, where he studied art obtaining
a first degree. On the death of his father he moved to Latina, Italy where
he continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. There, in
1992, he obtained a further degree, with honours.
There are 3 artistic (and ethnological) components always present in
this artist's work, that is to say
- the devotional influence of Russian icons (as a child he was educated
in the Greek orthodox religion);
- the typical expressionist forms of northern Europe, influenced by the
pop art of David Hockney, who like Andrew Radkowsky came from Bradford,
Yorkshire;
- lastly, the Italian influence of the Renaissance, with its strict rigour
of composition and perspective, and its postural elegance.
Daniele Iosimi, art critic, 1999
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“I first became involved in Andrew Radkowsky's career in 1993, when
he had a personal exhibition in the Cortina Art Gallery in Rome ( see
catalogue, an exhibition called "2508") Andrew already had an
artistic and aesthetic ideal and he was even then researching into solutions
to put these ideals into practice, solutions that we can admire in his
work today. This research has resulted in an ever broadening and deepening
of his work, which I would describe almost as physiological.
In other words, Andrew Radkowsky has not only widened his vision with
respect to his painting of figures, as well as his depiction of nature
and architecture. But he has also, more importantly, added weight to his
paintings. He moved forward by defining luminosity in his painting, to
the extent that he gave them an ethereal quality. I would say that his
approach to light is practically the opposite to the process used by de
Chirico, who in his work "Piazze" for example, merely hints
at the presence of a light source. His star is beyond the horizon, off
the field of the painting. It is a northern star, and therefore dichotomic
if considered together with the ominous foreboding of the hills in the
background.
Radkowsky, on the other hand, has achieved absolute clarity and total
luminosity. We would have problems trying to establish the source of this
light, in Radkowsky's work. His "star" radiates light indistinctly
on figures and objects with the same intensity, and so has the same internal
as well as external impact, both in the foreground and in the distance.
Taking this into consideration there develops a disquieting thought, which
has more to do with a possibility rather than a hypothesis. Is the star
(or stars) that we are dealing with actually our old familiar Sun or is
it another one? So, are we on our dear old Earth or. where? Whereas de
Chririco presents a metaphysical world, Radkowsky's world is realistic
in every detail.”
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