Vagrant loiterers, fur-coated ladies, street boys, busy gentlemen: these are the Strangers in Andrey Esionov’s art. Esionov is the father of post-Soviet visionary neo-realism, and his first Venetian exhibition, curated together with author, poet, and painter Tahar Ben Jelloun and historian and essayist Giordano Bruno Guerri, is a collection of seventy-plus watercolour portraits of daily life, travel memories, and the aftermath of an existence marked by the political turmoil following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Watercolour is the “expression of a humanity that waits to be saved by art, poetry, music. Esionov’s art is amazing, surprising, different, and similar, though always close to the human”.
