Nicolas Fédorenko or the adventure of art

“What interests me is the revelation of thought which becomes flesh, the storm of the living, the forge with breathes hard in everyone”.

For Nicolas Fédorenko, the storm is announced with the reproductions of Rembrandt, Modigliani, and Bonnard, which he looked at while still a child. He spent his youth in Plouescat in Finisterre, and if life does not explain much in the adventure of creation, the great gap between the Brittany of his boyhood and the Ukraine of his father is perhaps not unconnected with the idea of rupture, spirituality, and his interest in colours and objects which have always been the foundation of his work. Somewhere between abstraction and figuration, from the icon to popular art, his painting is perhaps linked to the world which surrounds him, but the “picturesque” does not interest him. The painter’s thinking is incarnated above all in the quest for light and proceeds by way of gesture, matter and colour. And this “reality of painting” makes the picture, which appears “when the exercise of painting disappears”.

The strength of an approach is asserted through paintings, drawings, sculptures, engravings on wood, ceramics, stained glass windows, and urban design. Because if, to borrow his own words, painting is the impalpable, it exists in energy, covering, and mess, to use his words again.

Excerpt from an essay by Françoise Terret-Daniel, February 2015.