Once someone said that the future of art is in the past and that at present, art "resounds" with a kind of spiritual holocaust. These words seem to be coming increasingly true. The gradual, yet indisputable weariness of installations, which look as if transferred from the 1950s means that these attract fewer and fewer followers. Even though non-artistic means of expression will probably continue to play a certain role in fine arts, one day the artistic scene worldwide will certainly be flooded by art that will require creativity and an ability to produce more permanent values in art. In the words of a critic, it will be a period, when "... it will be necessary to be gifted and know how to draw and paint". In a sense, this is an answer to a question whether the next millenium will not see the end of art. It will not. Art will survive a certain crisis of stagnation and "Noah" will sail to the next millenium with the works which will have survived on the strength of their own identity and conviction. In response to the tendencies of the contemporary trends of fine arts, another question has often been asked: Is this the end of painting? Even though multimedial activities hold the floor at the moment, painting is regaining its ground, which is confirmed by the fact that young and middle-aged artists are returning to this medium. One of those artists, who despite forced emigration into another environment did not cease to be a painter in the true sense of the word, is Mikhail Shchigol, a Ukrainian painter living in Prague.

Since October 18, 1996 when he exhibited in the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborce, Mikhail Shchigol has shown over a hundred oils, mostly from the latest stage of his career. Shchigol belongs to the artists for whom the most important means is the paint brought to the canvas by temperamental or even dramatic brushstrokes. It is a difficult struggle for a true statement, influenced by the artist's fate which has often given him ill treatment. The paintings of Mikhail Shchigol strike us as cries. The action represented in them seems to be in constant motion, carried by movement, following the star of hope. The horse flying in the clouds, a black and a white swan, figures, human faces, beings linked directly or indirectly to his experience. He says:

"When I came to Bohemia, to Železnice, the winter had just been over. I looked out of the window and on a small lake by the sanatorium a lonely swan floated. I felt lonely too. Then I painted two swans: a black one and a white one. The black one, that's me."

Until recently, Mikhail Shchigol was a lonely runner seeking an "oasis" and trying to forget his tragic past. He left his homeland to enable his son to keep up some hope of recovery from the disease. He has not yet told him of his mother's death. He says, "When Daniel asks where his mummy is, I always tell him she is on a trip and that once we will all meet."

The beloved mother and wife, an outstanding ceramist, got killed in a bus crash in the Uzbek mountains. On one of his large canvases he painted the painful scene of "escape" from this tragedy, when he depicted the small figure of a child as a symbol, a force pulling him from the black past to light, into the unknown. It is a severe struggle, a strain that requires a shift from the painful past to unknown future. Shchigol transposes this situation with the help of artistic means into a form of dramatic "stage" of human reality.

More than a hundred paintings by Shchigol, exhibited in the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborce provide a view of the rising maturity of this artist, of his intimate dialogue with life in the effort to find the new in the semidarkness of the past, sometimes even in the shadow of the forgotten ancestors.

Medzilaborce, Slovak Republic

October 1996