1970–
The entire spectrum bursts onto canvas with an astounding physical presence in the paintings of Slava Ilyayev. A virtuoso with the palette knife, Ilyayev is our living heir to the vibrant tradition of Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and the Fauve artists they inspired. Like all of them, he unleashes color and the textural potential of the paint itself in the service of a vision of nature that radiates light, warmth and energy. The seasons in all their chromatic glory come to life in his landscapes.
Ilyayev’s unique world view comes from his origins in a remote region where Europe and Asia intersect. Born on May 11, 1970 in Baku, Azerbaijan (an important city in the former U.S.S.R. that is an ancient outpost on the Silk Road between Beijing and Venice), he mastered his trade at the local college of arts. He made the dramatic decision to emigrate to Israel in 1995, completing his studies at the renowned Avni Institute of Art and Design in Tel Aviv.
READ MORE +The art community of Israel honored Ilyayev with several major exhibitions, starting with the Art and Sculpture Union in Tel Aviv and the Safrai Fine Art Gallery in Jerusalem. It did not take long for American collectors to catch on, and his fame became international.
Ilyayev, his wife Alexandra and their children live in Tel Aviv, where he also teaches.
“The tools are the rules.” That old studio adage offers insights into the unique way that Ilyayev uses the palette knife to build three-dimensional textures on canvas that give them an almost sculptural physical presence.
East meets West in the aesthetic of Ilyayev. His teachers at the Baku College of Arts belonged to the Apsheron school of painting, which advocated a blend of Asian and European styles that would only be possible from a point of view situated halfway along the Silk Road. The intense colors of Asian textiles and devotional paintings (such as Buddhist thangkas) find their way into landscape compositions that invoke the European traditions from the time of Claude Lorrain through the Impressionists.
Ilyayev’s palette is closely connected to the Post-Impressionist and Fauve ways of boosting the intensity of color to its maximum, and you can see the echoes of such major figures as Camille Pissarro, Vincent Van Gogh and Henri Matisse in his expressive style.
Completely unafraid of letting color loose in his canvases, he leads the eye down rainbow-colored, tree-lined streets and paths through verdant parks. The shimmering movement of the thick impasto slabs of paint add that sense of movement that the Impressionists were renowned for.
When Ilyayev paints a picture, he follows three main stages, all relying on his unbeatable skill with the palette knife. The base layer outlines the structure of the composition. He applies heavy swathes of thick impasto, building a texture similar to the raised impasto in the works of Van Gogh. Then he carves a linear composition into the raised paint, which can take as much as a year to dry. As the artist says, “I use specific, large amounts of color to make deep and diverse artwork. I need to do five or six layers to achieve this. After each layer, I observe the expression of the colors. In this way, I share how I’m feeling the colors.”
Accomplishments
Ilyayev’s works have been shown in various group and one-man exhibitions throughout Israel, the United States, Europe, and Asia.
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