“TRAVEL FROM PETERSBURG TO GUELL-GUE”
Painting
Small hall

“Gavrilchik has been always staying as the most vivid actor of the Petersburg art-stage, and the outer pattern of his life circumstances was designed to be set on the paper… Now, in his age, he indeed is a picturesque personage: dignified goings-on, weighty speech. Yes, it is dignified but not without a readiness to various pranks; yes, it is weighty but not without an obscene word. So, he became a normal patriarch — hooligan and not politically correct one”.
                             A.Borovsky

Recurrent birthday of Vladlen Vassilievich Gavrilchik is celebrated with his exhibition in the Small hall of the Borey Art Gallery — from November 27 till December 8.
The exhibition is named “Travel from Petersburg to Guell-Gue”; its idea was born by author in the remote 1965. It was a time of long and dull watches in the Pacific Ocean. But at the same time it was a period of loving and thorough studies of the medieval artists and icon-painters, their stylized images of the elements of the sea and the sky. The universe was filled with them only. It was a visual two-dimensional world, more relative than in the paintings by Aivazovsky and Turner. But it was as well more interesting, it gave an imagination the possibility to live according its own rules far from the objective reality. And the creator of this perfection was watch officer.
— “And have you ever seen how they draw mountains on the icons? Like flacky pies! And clouds? What a wonderful clouds are there on the drawings by medieval Japanese and Chinese!!! They thought equivalently not photographically! How was it at Van Gogh?” — “I painted boats seized with rough ocean. I read Grin. There was not so much to read those times. Good books were available in a few… And Grin was much for me. So the mood was formed, so the name for the exhibition was composed”.

There was a natural and as if appropriate desire to insert a world seen by the eyes of the imagination to a square of canvas; that very world which didn’t exist on geographical maps and report shots. As well as it didn’t exist in the observations of a person devoid of the imagination. But it appeared that such desire comes to the selected ones only. And it selects one from a million. And it is impossible to use a chance to see those without analogues and reasons.