SCôP Exhibition | Valery Katsuba: Russian Romantic Realism

“Valery Katsuba: Russian Romantic Realism” selects 38 masterpieces in the creative career of Belarus-born photographer Valery Katsuba, covering more than 10 major series of his works. Katsuba’s works combine Russian-style aesthetics with Western visual culture, a combination of romance and realism. This is the first time in China that audiences will have a chance to enjoy Katsuba’s elegant exploration of the human body and human relations through photography.

Personal Epic in Tides of Time

Valery Katsuba was born in the Republic of Belarus in the Soviet Union. He stands on the foundation of rich creative expression in Russian art history and pays his own homage to the grand tradition of Russian literature. Katsuba’s works are much inspired by personal experience, the times, and the changing aesthetics of body forms through history. Through the powerful lines of these elegant bodies, his photos speak out the desire for perfection, as well as the yearning for brilliance, beauty, and purity that peoples share in common. In a narrative visual language and with his romantic idealism, he has produced a number of “visual novels” in the medium of photography, as if he was writing personal epics in the tides of time.

In his Air Flight (2010-2011), his heroes hang in the air, making posture as arabesque with elegant bodies’ curves; The sculptural bodies in Phiscultura (1998-2008) and The Model: Classic and Contemporary (2008-2019), inheriting the aesthetic traditions of ancient Greece and Rome, are placed in magnificent spaces like grand stairs, palaces, art academies, and museums. The tension between perfection and power that reverberates across the picture is amazing and fascinating. while the underlying subtle and opaque metaphors are waiting for viewers to penetrate.

Seeking for Romance in Introspection

Looking at the portraits by Katsuba, we are awed by their charm. The figures in the portraits aspire to be heroes of their time, as indeed some of them are in real life. In his Russian Olympic Project for the Winter Games in Turin (2006), Katsuba takes as models Olympic sportsmen and women, photographed in the rural towns or villages that are their native places. In these precious personal moments of return to their family origins, we see their souls, as well as the dichotomy between their achievements and fragility; Far Away from Home (2004-2014) tells a sailor’s story about love, loss, and the search for new love, where a man escaping from himself eventually begins to turn into a road to himself, a road to home; When turning to Morning (2011-2014), we feel a certain expectation but also the familiar uncertainty that we feel when we embrace a new day or the birth of new things. In either case, nothing obliterates the desire for life.

Even though it is obvious from motifs in Katsuba’s works, like the staged settings, figure's expressions, postures, and the calculated ornaments that this world is unmistakably Russian, the indelible seam of romance - is the one all nationalities share in common, no matter who we are or where we are from. Just as the delicate question posited in all great Russian literature - human emotion is the very core of our existence. At this moment in the grand river of time, seen through the prism of dramatic changes in social economy and culture, the posturing of the figures in his photographs, their often introspective gaze, seems to point as much forward to the self-reliance upon which we will necessarily depend as they direct our gaze back to the past. Through Katsuba’s works, this exhibition tries to encourage viewers to pay attention to their personal life and to find their own romance in reality.

“Valery Katsuba: Russian Romantic Realism” will open on June 12 at SCoP. Look forward to your visit!