Andrey Esionov, Via Appia | Courtesy Andrey Esionov

The Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa is hosting at its headquarters in St. Mark's Square a solo exhibition (the first in Venice) of Russian artist Andrey Esionov, co-curated by writer, poet and painter Tahar Ben Jelloun and historian and essayist Giordano Bruno Guerri. The exhibition, titled Strangers, presents 70 works that take the public on a journey to discover the work of this talented Master of contemporary Russian figurative art, a member of the Russian Academy of Arts and honorary academician of the Academy of the Arts of Drawing in Florence, as well as the founder of post-Soviet visionary Neorealism. Esionov's watercolors on paper, set in an evocative setting, translate a particular combination of academic tradition and the artist's personal perception of the world into an innovative and contemporary key, triggering a continuous suspension between realistic depiction and an "other," symbolic and fabulous dimension that unites all. Passers-by, street painters, children and animals are the protagonists who inhabit Esionov's world, whose alienating visions of a bright, seemingly normal and tranquil everyday life draw inspiration from the history of his own country, his travels in Europe, and the epochal changes and political upheavals of the former Soviet Union that he experienced firsthand.

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