Cellist Musician (2010)

Description

An Alexander Trifonov canvas looks arranged before it looks painted. Musicians and still lifes are set into a geometry that feels architectural: part stage set, part puzzle. He came to painting through the theatre, and that instinct for staging, light and placement never left him.

He works in oil with a graphic precision closer to set design than to conventional painting, flat planes of colour held in careful tension. He follows Receptualism, a Russian avant-garde idea that puts the viewer’s perception ahead of straightforward illusion, so the strangeness sits in the arrangement rather than the brushwork.