Andrei Petrov (b. New York, 1966) is an American painter. He studied art at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York City, SUNY Purchase, and SUNY New Paltz. His family immigrated to the United States from Russia, his grandfather having narrowly escaped the gulag. His uncle was the dadaist-surrealist artist Dmitri Petrov, who had anarchist-socialist leanings. These origins inform the paintings of Andrei, which have a melancholy tone that strives towards lost memories and recollections. In this, they not only share commonalities with the Hudson River School and American Abstract Expressionism, as Petrov affirms, but also those of Edward Hopper. In his abstract compositions, one can often make out the hint of a solitary figure, examining their environment, like in traditional Chinese landscape painting. The viewer is invited to join them in quiet contemplation. He is based in New York.
Petrov, a native new yorker, situates his imaginary at a crossroads between the Hudson River School and Abstract Expressionism. The color and varnished glaze he uses make one think of streams and rivulets running through layers of autumn leaves. Round forms evoke boulders embraced by green mosses and the dark stems of vines. These rich colors have a hard, textured sheen that remains flexible, like the pastellone used for the flooring of venetian palazzos, making them ready to bob and shift along with the water’s temperament. But the surface of Petrov’s work is more like that of dried tree sap; lacquer he has extracted from recollections of the natural world. The volumes he places beneath the surface, usually giving an impression of quiet serenity, bubble up from time to time in expressive rifts and bursts of sentiment.
In my approach two roads are taken: a natural, Hudson River School path of light and drama filled grandeur that encounters energetic animated gestures, muscular surfaces, and bold strokes familiar in Abstract Expressionism. Beneath numerous glazes and opalescent layers swaths of paint dash about this stage and often emerge from the lower depths of which there are many levels.
