For the first time in a long time, Leonid Rotar’s solo exhibition will be held, which includes works from his large series made over the past ten years, as well as new paintings showing a world on the verge of extinction.

Recalculation
2012
Oil on canvas
180 × 220 cm

For the first time in a long time, Leonid Rotar’s solo exhibition will be held, which includes works from his large series made over the past ten years, as well as new paintings showing a world on the verge of extinction.

The works are executed in an ascetic manner characteristic of the artist with a minimum of details and focus on the human figure, as if caught off guard by the camera lens. The end of the world, as seen by Rotary, is far from the scenes of the raging natural elements in the spirit of Bryullov, which have become a pictorial cliche in the long history of waiting for the end of mankind. There is also no accusatory morality with violent images typical of Bosch or Goya. The artist’s view of the world-old theme is very modern, offering a psychological experience rather than a contemplative one.

Like Hitchcock’s films, inner excitement and inexplicable anxiety are conveyed to the viewer by carefully selected techniques: the oppressive dark background of huge, human-sized canvases, clocks stopped at zero, a naked landscape more reminiscent of the moon, or a cross, either church or grave. All this creates a feeling of ringing silence and complete loneliness. And what could be worse for such a social being as a human being? Rotar chose children and teenagers as the main characters of his apocalyptic plot, whose pale, slender bodies with ominously empty eyes sometimes appear timidly, and sometimes in unconscious glee against the background of darkness. Designed to represent the future, childhood in Leonid Rotar’s works takes on the color of the inevitable end of civilization, when the world, abandoned by adults, left no support for further existence. The "end of the world" crosses the boundaries of not so much physical as moral destruction, after which there remains only a feeling of emptiness and hopelessness.