The Impression of Light
Armando Verdiglione

In the distance, a huge block of buildings, with various porches, along the avenue. Built for the artists. Each of them, in his narrow atelier, has learnt to undertake the destiny of Russia and of the earth, but also to decide, by painting, his own future. The buildings are many, scattered through different zone, quite suburban.

And many artists. Hardly ever can an artist maintain his family and himself decorously. At eighty-three, Andrej Lyssenko lives the major part of his life in Abramzewo, a village of artists not far from Moscow. Nonetheless, his atelier attributes more than sixty years of production, from the Rostov Region to Samarcanda, from Saint Petersburg to the Black Sea, from the river Kuban' to Moscow.

Drawings that follow the drawings he used to do when he was child with charcoal on the walls of his home, or on paper with his first pencils and colours his mother bought him. Paper, masonite, sheets, canvases. Walls and shelves of the small atelier are filled with paintings. Each work draws, fixes and writes a piece of Russian history and politics, a strip of sky or sea, a glimpse of a hill or a plain, in a perpetual fable of light. The ages, the houses, the cities, rivers, mountains, the fields, the climate, human beings intervene here as moods of the eternal, rather than subjects of painting.

Nor is the Forgotten painter (1982), a self-portrait. Instead, it represents a portrait of painting and its romance. No lament. No revenge. Paint-brushes. Hands placed in the form of a cross or chiasm. The intensity of light. Decision. Certainty. In the painting of Andrej Lyssenko, each element of civilisation, politics, intellectual life, each feature of sky and earth, each detail of the country, each aspect of the experience, each act of war, of peace or revolution, institutional or private, in short everything, partecipates in the glorification of life through painting. Feastivity. Celebration. Joy. Everything is explored, noted, written, almost from the beginning of the summer of geography.

Each time the decision stands in artifice. Each time, Andrej Lyssenko accompanies the things, of history and politics, of the city and of institution, towards light. Towards listening. Towards understanding. Read the Pioneer of 1952: the aleph indicates that the square is not possible and that from the orifice the colour comes so as the light, and the whole combination alike. The same with the painting of 1953, called In Springtime, the geometry is impossible, so that the program, which actually turns light, then listening, proceeds from the diagram.

And in Rain, also dating 1953, the landscape remains a writing of life, almost a saga of civility. So as in Farmer of the Virgin Lands (1955), from the impossible square the intellectual journey proceedes. Read Breaking Wave, of 1958: and note how this painting traces the same drawings of Leonardo. Read A day of sun (1960), grandiose and stupendous masterpiece: the woman, the table, the basket with fruit, the open book, the vase with flowers, the two windows, the garden, on one side and on the other, the light, it's distribution, it's writing, it's climax of fulfilment. Longer on Apple Blossom (1961), or on Sunny Shore (1968): you will notice the miracle writes itself till the paradigm of glory. Read "through" each painting of this art book. Light does not flow from the part of the audience.

It comes from elsewhere. It comes from the eternity of the instant. It comes from another time, demanding a turn. The counterlight emphasises the process of the glorification of life through it's writing. Writing of light. Writing of painting. Writing of the itinerary of civility. Each painting insists on the impression. On the impression of light. On its imprimatur. On the sign of the feast. The impressionism of Andrej Lyssenko lays here: life writes and glorifies itself.

Qualifying itself. Realism is not socialist, yet impossible, established by authority, willing to removal, and with capacity, which belongs to ethics. Constructivism enhances the impression: idea materialises into life writing itself. To remain.

The work of Andrej Lyssenko remains. Delivered, in its joyous solemnity, to those who are able to read, through it, the sky and the earth. No longer with any system.