“Sergey Shaevitch: 21st Century Life Imagined”

It’s hard to envision a more delightful set of paintings than those produced by Sergey Shaevitch. The colors, lines and shapes that occupy his abstractions intertwine among themselves as though in a dance inspired by the music of a smile.

You can feel this experience in Shaevitch’s 2008 painting, “Flamenco.” Here, bright washes of light blue color merge with the ground of the canvas to provide a backdrop for several dark irregular forms situated almost randomly within the format. Both the wash and the overlying forms erupt with spinning, swirling lines that occasionally become segments of circles dotted with small rectangles of contrasting color. Throughout the painting, and in all of Shaevitch’s work, the calligraphic character of the brushwork is wonderful to behold all by itself.

These paintings reside within the tradition of Surrealist abstraction epitomized in the early decades of the 20th Century by the Swiss artist, Paul Klee. Yet Sergey Shaevitch brings a distinctly 21st Century sensibility to this tradition in the way that it’s energy is more intense, it’s color hotter, and its rhythm more complex. Given his background as a native of Belarus who spent his teen years as an Israeli and who now lives in Canada, his art reflects the new globalized world that art and all of us live in today.