"Nash Izograph" (a monthly Moscow magazine),
Number 4, April, 1999

VERA SOBKO

English translation by Gregory Burnside, Washington, D.C.

"Paintings which Force One to Think"

     When you see paintings by Valery Valius for the first time, it is difficult to understand immediately whether you like them or not. There is absolutely nothing usual, which you would like to see and which could produce the "joy of recognition". The paintings arouse a strange worry, you find yourself constantly returning to them in your thoughts, and you desire to take another look at them. The very widest spectrum of opinion - from complete lack of acceptance, to ecstatic, complete recognition of his style, occurs at the artist's exhibits. His manner of painting is determined not by a desire to shock the public, but by the fact that Valery Valius is brightly expressed individuality, in life as in art. The works of Valius have their own look, not at all because he has found some particular kind of artistic ploy, but because his thought is expressed in a most clear, one may say naked, way, on the canvas. If one were to conditionally subdivide painting into the contemplative and the semantic, then Valius, without question, belongs to those who express the concrete idea, which in its graphic embodiment becomes easier to understand. The artist is appealing to, first and foremost, human reason. But in order for the thought to reach consciousness, according to the laws of psychology, it must be emotionally colored. It is precisely that which determines the artistic style of Valery Valius. A saturated, sonorous palette, local color, a wide, thick brushstroke - the artist often works with a putty knife - all of this rivets one's attention. And after this follows getting the feel for the subject, reading it gradually. Far from everything can be "read" on the first reading, many things demand additional thought. But it is precisely this that is the essence of the artist's magnetism.
     As often happens in our time, Valius came to art from a totally different sphere. He graduated from the Physics Department of Moscow State University, worked in geophysics, and successfully defended his dissertation. However, present in his life were the prerequisites for him to perceive reality not only from the point of view of the exact sciences. Valius's mother, the well-known writer Anna Valtseva, in many of her works treats the theme of creativity. In part, the novel Happy Man is dedicated to the outstanding artist Pyotr Adamovich Valius - Valery's father. For sure many Muscovites remember that at the beginning of the '70's crowds came to the workshop of Pyotr Valius on Ostrovsky Lane to see his paintings, since officially they were not exhibited anywhere. When, after his death, Pyotr Valius' workshop was requisitioned, and there was the dangerous possibility that the paintings could be destroyed, Valery managed to have his father's paintings taken out to Germany. Emigration turned out to be a landmark period in his life. It was then that he began to paint. With the coming to power of Gorbachev Valery returned to his homeland and brought the canvases of his father with him.
     In the works of Valery Valius, all of the most painful problems of human society, Soviet-non-Soviet-post-Soviet - have accumulated. All of the vital themes: freedom and unfreedom, the ability to be speak and be heard, the value of human life and its meaning, wars and ecological catastrophes. In a word, everything that has anything to do with each of us and about which we do not think deeply very often. Even the titles of the artist's paintings speak of the social, or rather more exactly, general human orientation of his work: "How the Steel was Tempered", "The Righteous Man", "The Argument", "The Confessions Divide Up God", "Woman and the Church", etc. But life also has another side - the intimate, the lyric, where interrelations between two people arise. A sharpness of perception and of fantasy permit the artist to develop this theme, too, in a rather unexpected way, as if inviting us to experience and evaluate our own acts.