Јon / Evgeny Malyshev

Age: 35

Јӧn’s work is imbued with nostalgia for the Soviet past, childhood memories of Kaliningrad and the Baltic Sea. The stylization of old black-and-white photographs and drawing parallels with the paintings of socialist realism reminds us that the reality of the past has lost its ideals and relevance, and the new time emerges as glitch effects, artifacts deliberately left behind when composing collage sketches. Water symbolizes the substance of time — nirvana, to which people are approaching with every second of their lives; and which carries the danger of the unexplored.

In 2020−2021 he took part in the following exhibitions: Wall Choice at the Rosenau Gallery (Kaliningrad), Squatting Research (Moscow), Art Memory (Moscow), street art festivals: Carte Blanche (Yekaterinburg), Raum space (Kaliningrad), Place (Nizhny Novgorod), Territory 39/13 (Chernykhovsk), the festival of contemporary art KaliningrArt and others. As a result of a long search for a theme and style of painting, Jon has found something close to him that resonates with many viewers. He considers the 2020s and 21s to be a time of rebirth for himself as an artist.

At the BLAZAR contemporary art fair at the Museum of Moscow, curator E. Lapteva writes of his installation «Swimmers» as follows: «The artist develops in this work the theme of metaphysics, collective memory and the collapse of the old analog optics and the arrival of the new digital one in its place… „Swimmers“, „divers“, „bathers“ — keywords by which thousands of pictures can be found in the world memory, among them the work of impressionist Gustave Caybotte „Divers“ and sports young people building communism and not forgetting water procedures from the paintings of Alexander Deineka and even „Big Splash“ by the father of British pop-art David Hockney… and an early work by video-art classic Bill Viola, „Reflecting Pool,“ where a diver loses his reflection and hangs in the air as if levitating. In Evgeny Malyshev’s installation, the painting itself disintegrates.»

A continuation of this theme was the newfound art on Garazhnaya Street (Kaliningrad) as part of the KaliningrArt festival, where swimmers dive into reality from different angles, losing their balance and connection to reality, leaving only scraps of memories on the surface.