PERSONALITY IN ART
ARTWORK AS A CONFIDENTIAL CONVERSATION WITH THE VIEWER Mikhail Rogalevich is one of those Belarusian artists who left a unique mark on the national fine arts
T
oday it will not be an exaggeration to say that the art of Mikhail Rogalevich touches the most intimate in the souls of people — the genetic striving of Belarusians for spiritual purity, sublimity, admiration for the beauty of life and the dignity of the human person in it. But it’s hard even to imagine that an artist who was destined to go through incredible trials by fate, who got orphaned as a small child in the pre-war period, will be able to preserve faith in human and humanity in his soul, and even speak about it at the top of his artistic talent. Where did the artist get his spiritual energy and strength from? Maybe they gave them a towel embroidered with small horses — the only relic and all the legacy that remained from the parents. It is not for nothing that we see it in many works by Rogalevich. Or maybe he was inspired by the only surviving picture of his mother — a very young girl with long beautiful hair and light eyes. The artist dedicated several paintings to her. In his paintings, he glorified the quiet, complex, at times contradictory, but largely filled with popular optimism and inner enlightenment, life of former peasants who moved permanently from the village to town. Rogalevich was the first,
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БЕЛАРУСЬ. BELARUS 2021
M. Rogalevich. Self-portrait
and perhaps the only one among Belarusian artists, deeply and consistently, from year to year, to reveal this topic, speaking through painting about the achievements of spiritual culture that a rural Belarusians brought to urban life — a tradition-filled cult of family relations, optimistic percep-
tion of the world, kindness in relations with people. The artist began to exhibit his first works on this topic at republican small exhibitions back in the 1960s, when most of his colleagues, often ashamed of their peasant origin, dedicated their works to
reflecting industrial processes. The theme of sincerity, the majestic beauty of human relationships in the family was one of the leading in the work of Mikhail Rogalevich. His artistic activity is also distinctive because he was the first among Belarusian artists to reveal through art the truth about the tragedy of the people, which he himself experienced during the repressions in the pre-war years. These were rather intimate pictures that revealed the pages of his personal biography, the personal tragedy of Rogalevich and his parents, the pain of which did not subside for a minute. But at the same time, these were truthful, painful, bold steps towards great truth. Without a doubt, he is one of the most profound in the meaning of creativity and figurative imagery of contemporary artists. It is also obvious that his paintings bear the essence of the Belarusian mentality, concentrated on the priority of family and family relations in a person’s life. It is not in vain that the first personal exhibition of Mikhail Rogalevich in 1983 became a sensation. Almost the entire Palace of Art in Minsk was occupied by his paintings. More precisely, more than a hundred paintings and about the same number of graphic sheets (only a part of his creative achievements) filled the space of two floors of the country’s largest exhibition pavilion with the energy of images and colors. It was an unprecedented intellectual “fireworks-
