The paintings of the contemporary Russian painter Igor Shcherbakov (b. 1990) seem to be a continuation of the dreamy, mysterious, blue-toned and erotically charged world of the paintings of Franz von Stuck, Klimt and even a somewhat more polite works such as John William Waterhouse’s ‘Hylas and the Nymphs’ from 1896. This is not to say that Shcherbakov’s paintings are not unique, that they are mere copies of the past. On the contrary, I feel that his paintings beautifully blend the past and the present. The mood in his paintings is always between reality and reverie, between tangible and dreamy. The colour becomes emotion and the visible world is transformed into an interior landscape of mysteries which are left to the viewer to unravel..
Fig.1 Igor Shcherbakov, The Five Graces, 2024
Fig.2 Igor Shcherbakov, Sophie, 2023
Fig.3 Igor Shcherbakov, Nenuphars, 2015
Sad Enigmas
What is most immediately striking in Shcherbakov’s paintings is their atmosphere of suspended time. His scenes often feel as if they exist outside ordinary chronology. Figures are seen standing, reclining or moving through spaces that seem to hover in stillness, as though the moment has been drawn out beyond its natural duration. This sense of stillness gives the paintings their meditative quality. We are not witnessing action so much as we are inhabiting a mood. There is something irresistible in these paintings that draws us in, something mysterious, something slightly forbidden, half-ominous in a way we can’t explain. Shcherbakov’s women are beautiful, enchanting nymphs, sad enigmas, walking dreams. There is often little narrative in the conventional sense; instead, there is emotional weather. Light, gesture, shadow and colour all carry meanings deeper than any explicit story could tell. Shcherbakov’s paintings show the world as seen through blue-tinted glasses which brings to mind the seductive women from Franz von Stuck’s paintings as well as some nocturnal scenes from Edmund Dulac’s watercolour masterpieces. This choice of colour gives his art an almost cinematic tenderness. One feels that each painting captures not an event but the emotional residue of an event, the afterglow of an encounter, the quiet ache of solitude, the sweetness of a fleeting summer dusk already vanishing even as it unfolds. His works feel permeated by a sense of melancholy and a sense of mystery which doesn’t ask to be resolved. Yet this melancholy never becomes despair. Rather, it deepens the beauty, making each image feel more precious because it is fleeting.
Fig.4 Igor Shcherbakov, Model n3, 2016
Fig.5 Igor Shcherbakov, Litha.(Vol.2), 2024
Fig.6 Igor Shcherbakov, Two on a Bridge, 2021
Tender Haze
The handling of colour plays a profound role in creating this emotional atmosphere. Shcherbakov often uses soft, luminous hues that seem to dissolve forms rather than sharply define them. The edges between objects, figures and surroundings blur gently, as though everything is held in a tender haze. This creates a dreamlike quality in which the world appears softened, almost caressed by light. The palette often carries an emotional symbolism of its own. Deep blues, dusty blues, pale golds, muted greens and brown; these tones evoke not realism but feeling. They are the colours of memory, the colours of longing, the colours of beauty remembered through emotion rather than seen with the eye. This is also why I feel that all of Shcherbakov’s paintings are a continuation; different canvases but they belong to the same dreamy world.
Fig.7 Igor Shcherbakov, Yellow figure 3. Wax pastel on paper, 2014
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