When evaluating the works of an artist who was brought up in a different tradition it is not easy for a European spectator to use current criteria of values and interpretations of the contents based on the history of West European art and its artistic centres - Paris, Munich or Vienna. The situation is even more complicated by the fact that the vast area of the former Soviet Union, where Shchigol comes from, is filled with original, even if mutually influenced national cultures and local traditions.

Mikhail Shchigol is an artist from Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine which has only recently appeared on the political maps as an independent state, albeit one of the earliest cultural areas of Euroasia.

Kiev was the centre of the Kievan Russia, which on top of its Slavonic outlook adopted the Byzantine tradition, thus creating an independent trend within the development of artistic metaphysics. Even today, the sacral character of the representation, an emotional relation to the making of paintings, which resluted in the acknowledgment of the sacred mission of the artist, marks the place of art in the local society and its ability to "read" even the most abstract works of art.

The later inclusion of Kiev and the Western Ukraine in the sphere of Catholic influence contributed to the merge of Greek and Latin traditions in both spiritual and secular painting, unknown in other regions. In the second half of the 18th century, Chasidism originated in the Ukraine. It was a Jewish religious-philosophical school which emphasized beauty and sanctity of ordinary life, thus providing the elementary spiritual strength and feeling to the atmosphere of Kiev, Odessa and other Ukrainian cities, in which most of the Jewish ghettos were situated.

In the early 20th century, Kiev became one of the centres of the avantgarde, particularly in the area of painting. Boichuk's school held a leading position. Later, in the Stalinist period, this school was exterminated in fact three times - first administratively, then its members were murdered and last their works were destroyed. After all, in the Soviet times, Kiev itself was a provincial centre of the honest Socialist Realism of the Soviet empire.

Thus the art of Mikhail Shchigol has to be read against this historical background. In his spiritual works, the painter continues in the Byzantine tradition, being very lively, subconsiously possessing the Chasidic feeling. He is an artist longing for tolerance, even if he is an heir to the avantgarde legacy. He is strict with the form, expressing himself clearly, paradoxically enough in the spirit of the Classicizing Socialist Realism school, fortunately with the subtext of self-irony. At the same time, he consciously reaches for contacts with western culture. This kind of contact is really specific for the Ukraine (meaning edge, border), the place of meeting of various cultures.

The present historical situation, namely the end of the Soviet period, the reassessment of values and cultural confusion have not affected the substance of Shchigol's works, which aim at eternal values. He creates his paintings freely, dynamically, with the emphasis on the sense of personal responsibility for life and protection of beings connected with it, stressing the relation of one's own private world to the worlds of other beings, elements and cultures.

As for art historical systems, the art of Mikhail Shchigol is in harmony with the mediaeval Byzantine painter Theophanos the Greek, with the German expressionists and the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka. These parallels, however, do not determine the place of Mikhail Shchigol within contemporary painting.

Together with the non-conformist generation of artists of the 1960s, Mikhail Shchigol came through the lure of decorativism, op-art, conceptualism, and post-modernism. He tried all these trends in his early works, to finally remain rooted in the traditional language of painting, albeit in its new, free and profoundly original interpretation. His main efforts focused on the search for his own artistic world in which ethics, existence and philosophical categories form equal partners to plasticity, colour and rhythm.

Even though the present is dominated by the "screen culture", by the illusory visual realities, whose most influential example is provided by the video-clips, painting seems to be increasingly proving its philosophical and artistic values. The works of Mikhail Shchigol only confirm this view of mine.

It is also possible that in a new cultural situation we will have to reevaluate the various set criteria of art history and the principles of its systemisation, to give up the trend labels of the numerous "-isms" and start to investigate, interpret and evaluate personal artistic worlds. Mikhail Shchigol is one of those worlds.

Kiev, Ukraine

July 1992