Alexander Dodon

         The art of Alexandra Dodon is precisely defined by the words spoken many years ago by the remarkable Moscow artist Olga Bulgakova: "Art is a mystery that explains the wisdom of life, but which itself can never be solved, because the mystery lies at its basis. And the eternal desire will approach it - the greatest pleasure and the greatest torment of the artist.
         Easily cognizable reality, its forced organization and differentiation does not interest Alexander. He wants to see and feel life as a kind of "unknown", not passed through a sieve of tedious logic and cold reason, but as an alluring mystery of knowing the past and present, but with many revelations and mysteries. It is in the picturesque space that Alexander ideally builds an amazing  a diverse world where everything is interconnected and merged in a harmonious unity, where there is contrast and antinomy, combining contemplative concentration with carnival riot, intellectuality with naivety, ironic overtones with serious moral principles. He does not translate his art into the plane of rational classification, but combines logic with fantastic fiction. In the "visible" reality, he is always looking for unknown territory, which for him is an amazing journey into the encoded space of Being. He loves to mix and match semantic layers and ways of building an image, this is how his own reality arises, not programmed by professionalism, but a "land of surprises". Grandiose in conception, format and quantity, the "Park" series of paintings indisputably confirms the last thesis. Here Dodon showed true "natural" thinking, which is based on the fusion of the artistic ability to use the achievements of the historical past in the study of landscape painting and the creation of his own "image" of reality. The classical school, which he went through at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, at the graphic faculty, in the workshop of Professor A. Pakhomov, honed his innate talent to the end and he became a serious master with virtuoso performing abilities. These splendid technical skills - an accurate, well-balanced drawing, compositional construction, perspectives and special color vision - were most clearly manifested in the "park" suite. In "Alexander's picture space, within the limits of his author's personal truth of experiences, an eternal theme is played - the fixation of recognizable reality, in the artist's reading it becomes a philosophical concept of the universe itself. This is his universe, a microcosm, equipped with the power of his violent imagination and understanding of the spirit of Nature. The ideal world is how it is represented in ancient traditions as harmony and order - a lost and regained paradise, visibly it is embodied in the "Blessed" Gardens (the etymological synonym for "garden" is "paradise"). Alexander defined such a mythical or, rather, philosophical understanding, biblical Garden Gatchina park landscapes for yourself (Gatchina is an ancient city near St.  - Petersburg, with the residence of Emperor Paul), which he writes always, at any time of the year and at any time of the day. Here there is no explosion of the elements, there is no active presence of a person concentrating attention on himself, but there is the main thing - the look and feelings of the artist himself. He creates a world he loves, deeply felt by him, not encoded into the complex symbolism of artistic definitions, but a world alive, dramatic and full of associations. The artist's Gatchina landscapes are charged with an idyllic state, but this is a strange idyll - it is full of hidden emotional experiences. This gives a feeling of constant movement of the atmosphere, all color masses are in interaction with each other, thus creating the mobility of the picturesque environment. The artist perceives space intuitively, it depends on his correct understanding of light and color. Alexander definitely pays attention to every point, every stroke, every line and color spot, and in the context of his methodological process, this enhances the spatial and lighting effect: he likes to capture specific elements in the state of nature - shadows, ripples on the water, its movement, tree crowns, clouds , which creates that elusive air mobility that submerges the landscape view  into an atmosphere of quiet elegy. Everyone's favorite natural object "tree", which attracts artists with its sophisticated graphic forms and expressiveness of color, dressed in green, gold, crimson foliage, covered with white snow, weaving a fancy ornament with thin black branches - is the main character in the pictorial series of his own myth-making, composed by Alexander. The tree is an ancient symbol, sacred and magical, possessing the power of good and evil, personifying the flow of Divine energy, the tree of life and development of the human soul, the tree of knowledge, and without its "slender" image it is impossible to imagine a single landscape of Alexander (Crimea, Pskov region, Moldova, Gatchina). This is his personal, universal symbol, and maybe a metaphorical Sign in the context of the philosophical coordinates of his pictorial language.
Biblical allusions are clearly read in the charming portrait of the youngest daughter Mary with a rabbit in her arms. Dodon painted it in a harsh, dryish manner, reminiscent of Spanish portraits of the 16th century with a dense, laconic color and a sharp line. The paradox here is that this small canvas depicting a little girl is directly related to the theme of the "Garden" - in Christianity, the so-called "closed" garden was associated with the image of the Virgin Mary. Large-scale, in every sense, canvas, man and fish  in essence - a picture of an allegory. The canvas depicts a real genre scene with a simple unpretentious plot - an old fisherman from the Karelian shores bowed in reverence to a dear and expected guest, presenting him with a big fish as a gift. Dodon decided the composition concisely with a minimum of details, the whole objective world of a modest living environment is built into a strict and understandable series of biblical symbols - attributes, where fish - salmon - the body of Christ, an ordinary glass mug filled with red caviar - the blood of Christ, and the fisherman himself - a good Christian , the shepherd of God. The coloristic arrangement of the canvas is akin to the sound of light, as on the canvases of Rembrandt himself - a deep dark background and bright accents of color on the details (here shades of red), and the plot is built according to his "spiritual" principle - great in simplicity. Here, in the quiet confines of a closed life, sometimes violently cheerful, sometimes with a smile of irony  in relation to ourselves, and sometimes filled with pain and tragedy, but always open and hospitable, the sacrament of the rite of human existence takes place.
         The self-portrait genre is strange and unpredictable. In the visual arts, this is the only available way of imaginative fixation of the artist's dialogue with himself. Alexander had an irreversible need to see himself from the outside, but himself not as an empirical personality with a certain and completely native appearance, character, temperament, but as a poetic personality, an Artist. He just wanted to talk with his second "I", look inside himself, understand, evaluate, merge and see on the canvas, as in the reflection of a magical amalgam, the image of the creator formed into a unity of external and internal. And he succeeded. The result was a stern, concentrated and beautiful face of a Renaissance man, painted with sharp, quick, laconic strokes of the brush. In the paintings "Mystery" and "Communion" new stylistic trends can be traced, the pictorial language becomes more metaphorical and thoughtfully conditional. The entire pictorial field "infects" the author's own vision, with the seeming impartiality and cold facelessness of the forms, it heats up with personal enthusiasm and emotional tension. The lines, elastic from impulsive bends, turning into almost geometric straightness in some places of the paint layer, exude a mysterious light. Deliberate simplification of the form does not reduce the pathos of the image, but emphasizes its sheer symbolism.
         The mythical creature Dragon, perhaps in ancient times it was real, has attracted Alexander since his “graduate” years, when he studied at the Academy of Arts. A huge, scaly, coiled Artifact is always by his side, his vision either pierces his creativity with a powerful wingspan, or is reflected in poetic dreams and thoughts. Dodon captured the dragon in various techniques, both graphic and pictorial. It was his fantastic image that became the ideological and semantic core of the artist's entire work. For him, this is a legendary creature guarding the entrance to the mysterious garden of the subconscious, to the world of another dimension. Dodon marked the center of the picture with a pyramid, on its top it exudes the magical light of the eyes of a fairy-tale snake, but in the transcription of the cosmogonic scale of the artist himself, this is nothing more than the Eye of God, in medieval traditions in the visual arts, its presence is determined. The entire texture of the canvas is unusually mobile, it shines, trembles, shimmers with all shades of mother-of-pearl from dark deep, purple and blue to the most delicate lilac-pink and blue colors. Picturesque matter is tangibly sensual, it pulsates in the rhythm of the breath of the Universe. In the reading of Alexander, the Dragon is the messenger of the Cosmos, his mystical mission is to guard the gates to the world of dreams and "otherworldly" illusions. His arrival on earth is grandiose, his body is powerful and divinely beautiful, in the "pictorial" dreams of the artist he does not frighten, but is the personification of the knowledge of the unknown. In the same stylistic stream as the "Dragon", the painting "The Birth of Venus" was made, framed in a rarely used format - a tondo (circle). The dynamics of the image here is given by swirling, wavy lines, rhyming with the movement of the circle itself, which creates a special plasticity and "musical" rhythm, and the color explodes with a "morning" extravaganza of colors and shades. The pearl of the sea opened up and the goddess of Love herself rose from the foam.
         The ideal picture of the world, seen by the artist in his structured order ("Dance"), he captured in a grotesque form - in a certain color environment (from dark cold blue through fiery red, yellow to lilac), he immerses the male and female figures in a kind of dance "pa". The four-part, in the development of the artist’s philosophical thought, is transformed into a universal concept of the universe: everything is divided into four seasons, a day, cardinal points, the shape of a cross, rectangles of windows, doors and walls, and Man here is already a symbol of Life. In the rhythmic movement of the figures, circling in the ethereal vacuum of the visual series, one can hear the music of the Cosmos. The artist created a unique dance, the dance of the Astral, projecting it on a picturesque plane in which there is a living shaping, the process of creating earthly Being. It is impossible not to recall another global work of Alexander Dodon - an illustrative cycle for the famous and beloved "Alice in Wonderland". The artist approached the literary material thoughtfully, thoroughly and creatively, he solved it in a traditional manner, using many graphic techniques, but in his own style. The book was published in 2001 and a serious critical assessment recognized Dodon's illustrations as the best in recent years.
         The famous St. Petersburg artist Alexander Dodon found his garden of "earthly joys" in his own house, in the circle of his beloved family, in which all his creative undertakings and successes are supported by his wife, with the fabulous name Luminitsa, also a wonderful artist, and daughters Maria and John, and dreams of the garden of "heavenly joys" whose gates are opened only for those who have the soul of an Artist, he realizes Art on his own territory.



                         Vera Veriyskaya, member of the international
                         association of art historians and critics.