Testimonials

ALEXANDER VOROBYEV FIRENZE BIENNALE INTERNAZIONALE Dâ'ARTE CONTEMPORANEA FORTEZZA DA BASSO December 2007

We admire at the Bienniale the Russian Maestro Alexander Vorobyev, who lives and works in England since 1994 , for birth, studies and the formation of his works. Vorobyev, originally worked as graphic designer, and uses oil, acrylic and watercolour to record his ideas. He is now member of the Royal Society of Watercolor Painters.

At the exhibition the Maestro is present with three large canvases that stand out on the wall and seem to move to our eyes. Certainly the precious colours appeal to us. They are laid with such a mastery to give us the certainty that the artist has the full control of this pictorial technology. One of the works on display is titled 'The City of Jerusalem' created in 2000, it is painted with a mixed technology between acrylic and collage that transmits a strong spirituality across the small psalms that cover it partially, and that introduce into this modern painting to the symbolist, political and abstract roots, wonderfully melted by a thin brushing that gives this painting an extreme finesse and gentleness. Lines seem to make these canvases vibrate that, even before knowing the author's name, transfer the Russian soul that created them.

Also from these works emerges the quality of the individual poetic of Alexander Vorobyev. Tenuous patterns of minute crosses pervade his works. That symbol, so small that you need to look for it, is given by precious disappearing brushstrokes. Here therefore what pervades the artist's soul: a deep and high spirituality that, like a song, goes up from these canvases. Alexander Vorobyev's passion for Malher's music gives peace and gentleness to his paintings.

Abstract and spiritual painting, mindful of a slight symbolism that restrains the Russian passion driving it more European-like, sometimes even near the metaphysics.

Dr Prof Emanuela Catalano, Storica dellâ'Arte

'Alexander Vorobyev's work maybe Russian, but it is also European. His drawings and paintings appeal to the eye, but their content is abstract and surreal. The lines are delicate, the colours startle with their lightness and chic but the images when you look more closely at them are of snails and foetuses, crosses and heads, limbs floating in space with orbiting postage stamps and the lowered head of a charging rhino. Life struggles, the wars and the battles for survival are nothing more than impromptu ballets against the unravelling folds of time.'

John Elsom, London critic

Beyond The Far Beyond

'His thinking is cosmic. Because of the purity and power of his reactions to the world around him, because of the intense inwardness of his vision, Alexander Vorobyev tries to break through to such worlds, which only can be seen at the end of the 20th Century, the kind of new images to which Kandinskiy, Filonov, Dali, Miro and Ernst all aspired to. By comparing the name of this artist to the greatest masters of our century I am not being misled by ordinary wishes of a fan to canonise his name among the saints of the abstract art and surrealism. I only want to express, as clearly as possible, the irrational nature of his art, which combines in organic whole these two lines of development.'

William Mayland, Moscow critic