Andrey Zadorin won the first prize of the International Biennial Contest "Fabriano Watercolor 2020". His paintings have much in common with photography, though there is a vitality breathing through Zadorin’s paintings that could never have been captured by a camera. With a warm poetic heart, the artist manages to convey someone’s personal identity and disposition in paint. This goes much further than outward resemblance. Sometimes, one need not even see the other’s face in order to recognize him. We recognize the attitude, the body language, and what some would call the “aura”. Zadorin faultlessly captures the signals from a glance or a posture and records them on the sensitive plate of his soul, and then “develops” these snapshots into a painting.

The impression of an observation through a lens is heightened because he consciously makes his paintings resemble old photographs and stills from films: he scratches the half-dry paint of the picture with the back of his brush.

With a glowing, penetrating light, he takes us to his early youth in Minsk, to an atmosphere of silence in which the melancholy whisper of our own memories may be heard.

As early as his childhood years, Zadorin was fascinated by black-and-white illustrations of a few of Rembrandt’s paintings. The virtuoso drawing style, the theatrical mise-en-scène and the chiaroscuro of the great master enthralled him, even before he had ever seen a single colour of Rembrandt’s. It is then no wonder that just those three elements became the hallmark of Zadorin’s own work

"It is winter. I am five or six years old. It is Sunday. I wake up, walk into another room, and see in front of the window my father and my older sister bent over the table. There lies an apple there and I ask them why they are looking at it. My father replies he is not sure if it is edible, because it is half-frozen. Dazzled, I come closer, pick up the apple and bite it. And then spit it out—it is not edible… So it is in art: the obvious charm might not work at a short distance. Many things are delusive, and watercolour, inparticular. To me, watercolour is first of all material, not a means in itself—when works are made to stress the particular qualities of that material. Most of my watercolours are copies of my oil paintings. The thing is that the technique I use is based on transparent paints and I do not use whitewash—I use pre-primed canvas instead. Twelve years ago, the Ukrainian gallery Nebo suggested that I replicate my previous oil paintings in watercolour but all in the same size 60x100 cm. This is how a series of over 50 watercolours was born." 

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