As the Soviet Union has become more of a distant memory, the works of Moscow painter Vasily Shulzhenko have taken on greater pathos.
When he first exhibited here in 1990, the Communist regime was in its final months but had not yet fallen, which undoubtedly influenced
how Western eyes saw Shulzhenko’s grotesque, tottering figures and interpreted their roles in the human comedy.
Now, however, he has no monolithic villain to mock or rail against, and what we once took as satire has become more complex and inward as the raucousness of his tableaux has quieted.
The development of Shulzhenko’s recent paintings, at the Maya Polsky Gallery, can be measured by setting “Love on the Oka River” (1996) against a canvas from his last exhibition, “Couple with Cupid” (1994).
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Both paintings present well-worn men who are about to fondle equally weathered women in the countryside. But the larger, older canvas pokes fun at the act by having a brutish deity float above the couple whereas the smaller painting focuses on the touch of the male and its surprising tenderness.
Similarly, “Mushroom Pickers,” from 1994, depicts two male figures, the one in the background more brutish than the other. “Mushroom Picker,” from earlier this year, retains only the humane foreground figure bent over his walking stick.
Several other pieces depict figures that contemplate the past, which Shulzhenko has located in the forms of landscape. In the main, they are industrial forms that once held promise for the Soviets but now are run-down, hopelessly blighted.
“The Banished” is Shulzhenko’s version of the Old Masters’ Expulsion from Eden. However, the landscape the nude figures have left is as desolate as the one they have entered, and this is very much in character with the dreams and reveries of figures in his other paintings.
On occasion, the artist distances viewers with mild comedy, as when Napoleon Bonaparte drinks Napoleon brandy and plays with a kitten as an ancient French foot soldier stands guard at what appears to be a stage backdrop of a Russian cathedral.
More commonly, though, the artist conceives everyday situations filled with inexplicable terror: The worker who awakens on a window ledge high above a courtyard; the child who shouts at a sleeping giant in front of a tenement; the hobo who wildly stumbles onto a promontory, arms outstretched, as if blinded.
Some of these images may be read as allegories having to do with Mother Russia on the eve of a new millenium. But like some of Goya’s images, they are unsettling enough not to have to stand for anything specific; their strangeness is all-pervasive, general.
A large canvas such as “The Bathers” also gives Shulzhenko, an academically trained realist, an opportunity to inject some sensuality into his nudes while apparently addressing some larger social issue. This was a trick much practiced at academies in Western Europe during the 19th Century. Old habits take longer to die in Russia.
There are, however, a greater number of freer, more abstract passages in these canvases, and besides anecdote Shulzhenko fleetingly indicates a love for the sensuous side of painting he had previously suppressed. The textures of clothing, shubbery, water, a blanket, a wall — these he renders with a freedom that his gift for caricature once held in check.
As his sympathy for the human condition has more clearly emerged, so has his pleasure in working in oils, and Shulzhenko’s paintings large and small are the better for it.
The “fantastic realism” that marked his older works also has diminished as his interests have shifted to the psychological life of his subjects. This, too, is a favorable development, elevating the pictures above the dark but somewhat easy jokiness of the pieces shown here in the past.
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At the Maya Polsky Gallery, 215 W. Superior St., through April 21.