Volodia Popov

The Luxor Museum of Art is proud to include the works of Volodia Popov in our exclusive collection: “The Luxor Museum Collection”

“A painting is a fellow who speaks of something that can only enter a human being through the eyes.”

Claude Simon

See bio below.

Volodia Popov-Massiaguine has tackled a variety of pictorial genres, exhibiting a particular talent for the female form and still-life’s. Thanks to a mixture of classical rigor and romantic fantasy, totally unaffected by any desire to copy others, Volodia Popov has turned his back on “realistic” illusion and expresses his feeling for life through a deliberate and lucid deformation of nature, thanks to a melancholic lyricism, to the mediation of dream world and fable. His works evolve in a magic atmosphere, in which predominates the inner life, meditation, aspirations to transcendence.

The enigma of womanhood, the surprise apparition of a portrait, the fairy tale quality of certain objects...for Vladimir Popov these mighty constants, which supply the foundation of his work, are at the same time potentials within which his poetic sense enjoys free play.

Each painting offers the viewer a sensual delight which offers introspective displacement thanks to an operation of magical enchantment.

Please is the rule. However, one should not misinterpret Volodia Popov’s objectives. It is not simply a question of esthetic enjoyment; rather it is a dialogue between melancholic sensibility and plastic beauty.

The compositions of Volodia Popov’s paintings are structured according to the laws of geometry, thanks to plane forms freed of all rigidly formal constraints.

No element seems to be superfluous. Purified, the composition facilitates the free movement of one’s gaze. From Byzantine iconography Volodia Popov has derived a form of composition with an inversed frontal perspective, which permits the viewer to concentrate on the figure, positioned in the very centre of the canvas in an often hieratic attitude. All realistic representation having been thus excluded, the viewer’s gaze is freed from the thralldom of semblance in order more easily to penetrate into a mysterious inner world.

A realization of how precarious is the equilibrium between the different elements of the composition reinforces the evanescent character of his painting.

Freed of every realistic and illustrative tendency, Volodia Popov uses a rich palette of colors with limitless warm hues. He thus plays with a vast variety of possibilities, without upsetting his permanent search for harmony.

The flesh tints are delicate, lines and colors blend, the relationships between hues are treated with a sure sense of nuance, light is introduced by subtle gradations of yellow and golden tones.

Far from rejecting his past, Volodia Popov has integrated his Russian heritage into his works thanks to a cosmopolitan view of art. His predilection for line and rhythm, his choice of colors, the frontal representation of his figures, the narrative enchantment of his paintings….are signs that need to interpreted in light of his Russian and Orthodox heritage.

Volodia Popov has brilliantly achieved a synthesis between Eastern and Western art, the figurative and the abstract, the real and the imaginary.