ANDREI PETROV | The Washington Post

In the galleries: Landmark show lauds two iconic artists

Also: A multi-artist exhibit spans nearly a century of the Black experience in America; two artists deal with the war in Ukraine indirectly with personal and esoteric approaches.

Review by Mark Jenkins

April 28, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Leonets & Petrov

No signs of war are evident in Jaroslav Leonets’s and Andrei Petrov’s recent work, but their paintings respond to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Leonets’s landscapes depict a land of rustic beauty, barely touched by mankind but achingly vulnerable. Petrov’s landscape-influenced abstractions refer to an earlier period in the region’s history, yet were sparked by the Russian onslaught.

Leonets is a Kyiv resident who began painting rural Ukrainian scenes before the full-blown war began. His Amy Kaslow Gallery show, “Documenting Landscapes: Ukraine’s Vanishing Terrain,” features nine impressionistic oils made between 2019 and 2022. They’re painted primarily with sunny hues, yet with areas deepened by shadow. The majority of them feature bodies of water alluringly splashed with reflected light.

Andrei Petrov’s “Fugitive Sun,” in his exhibit “Footprints in the Snow.” (Andrei Petrov/Morton Fine Art)

Similar highlights characterize most of the oils in Petrov’s Morton Fine Art show. But as indicated by the show’s title, “Footprints in the Snow,” the reflections play on white fields rather than blue lakes or rivers. Petrov is a D.C.-born New Yorker whose suite of pictures was inspired by his grandfather’s 1915 escape from a Siberian labor camp, a flight that took him to China and eventually the United States. Petrov is partly of Ukrainian heritage, and the Russian assault motivated him to revisit this chapter in his family history.

Both artists apply pigment thickly, but after that, their methods diverge. Leonets’s technique is as traditional as his imagery; clouds and cliffs alike are rendered with thick but loose gestures. Petrov applies layers of color that he then cracks and partly removes. Many of his pictures are defined by fissures that suggest the collision of tectonic plates. This signature move is visually striking, but also thematically suggestive: The fractures suggest breaks in the timeline or lives shattered by history. Where Leonets’s landscapes appear pretty but threatened, Petrov’s abstractions conjure centuries of ruin and loss.

Jaroslav Leonets: Documenting Landscapes: Ukraine’s Vanishing Terrain Through May 7 at Amy Kaslow Gallery, 7920 Norfolk Ave., Bethesda.

Andrei Petrov: Footprints in the Snow Through May 7 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, No. 302.0Comments