paintings


Sergey Merenkow
The painter Sergey Merenkov lives in the most remote point of Russia, near Japan, where the Trans-Siberian Railway ends, 7 days by train from Moscow.

The main theme of Sergei Merenkov's creativity is the life of ordinary people, somehow childishly naive in their attitude to the world.
Varied in the plot and in the compositional solution, the works of the artist show an inexhaustible creative imagination and professionalism. In most of the works, the action takes place against the background of the landscape. The heroes of his works are endowed with individual characteristics and live in different life situations: sometimes funny, a little sad, but time and again they bring a smile to the viewer. For the author himself, they are full of meaning.

In the artist's work we can always perceive a dialogue with the past. It does not consist of this or that style of suffering, but of familiarity with the concept of "universality". The artist naturally takes the current echoes of the past into the present. Here we have his "Morpheus", his "Icarus", "Whatever may Jupiter, the ox may also" and others. In this way, the artist affirms his dimension of spiritual life, his creative imagination of the clearly self-evident and attractive "universal time", which poetically transforms the present day-to-day life into the world of ancient eras.

In many of Sergei's works, the graphic series of his photographs is based on recognizable objects from everyday Russian reality. His village heroes are simple, naive, ridiculous, they live in paintings where past and present are closely related. The rooms in which the events unfold on his canvases are the result of the interweaving of nostalgic memories and folklore. The environment in which their heroes find themselves is fantastic and at the same time very real. And the people who live there are friendly and eccentric. There is a kind of honesty and irony, doom and sorrow, a deep philosophy and humor in the artist's work. But despite the apparent simplicity and naivety, Sergei Merenkov's works are very multidimensional. Situational ideas, which the artist paradoxically project onto literary, folkloric, historical or mythological subjects known to the viewer, are provided with irony or a warm smile.

Through the characters of the paintings, the artist shows his feelings and reflections, while the meaning of the works is not limited to the author's story. His resolve to understand important and eternal problems is also illustrated by lyrics and humor. At the same time, the viewer has his own numerous connections regarding the content of the artist's images.
His ironic, colorful works, which have a peculiar style and signature, attract attention and discussion. Thanks to humor, talent and imagination, Sergei Merenkov creates ironic-sarcastic images that attract the viewer not only with the clarity of the images, but also with a hidden meaning, with intrigue and deep understatement.

The artworks below by Sergey Merenkow are available at