Yury Popov is a wonderful painter with a simplistic art style that is easily comprehensible by a wide audience. His art is distinguishable from others by his choice to include everyday subjects and scenes that evoke peaceful childhood memories and the harmony of quietness and calmness. His compositions carry the warmth of home, an idle river, rustic windows, serene villages, minimalistic kitchen items, or a beloved cat or dog. He uses the transparency of light to highlight his subjects with spatial awareness. His choice of subjects instills feelings of divine connection in his audience.
The simple subjects he uses can evoke a feeling of a harmonious balance between love and the world itself. Playful irony makes his art more open for connection to poetry and helps broaden the limits of one’s imagination. It is no coincidence that he often uses windows, frames, and curtains in the background as it provides a sense of wholeness to his work.
He carefully selects, designs and makes wooden frames for each piece that become an organic part of the entire composition. This approach with designed frames allows his art to be experienced like a window to greater reverse perspective depth and poetry of art. Yury’s art style exemplifies the traditional Russian love for iconic approaches to achieving divine harmony. His art resonates with the idea that through painting the artist could bestow the idea of divine timeless eternity and individual blessings on his audience.
Elena Hudonogova
Former Head of Department of School of Fine Arts of Krasnoyarsk. Art Historian, Ph.D., honorable member of Russian Academy of Fine Arts, Russia
Similar to Altman’s style. Almost identical in material density to Filonov, with his ideas of analytical art, where every inch of the painting is loaded with contents and information. Comparable to Picasso with his deformations, creating the mobility of nature and unexpected turns of surprises.
The composition in color is like spring itself in the woodlands. The saturation is natural, but the character in the hat and in it the style is artistic. Yes, and the color is symbolic, deep. It balances the hero of Popov’s painting. It is essentially a self-portrait of the artist. The desire for European socialization and living in the wildness of nature. Decorativeness of color extracts the primary and the secondary from the entire painting. Everything is important. No priorities. We meet an interesting personality, loaded with creativity, dispersed in the cosmic space of colors and vision.
The style of Yuri Popov absorbed the techniques of many artists of the world, inspired by their work, but it is a distinguishably unique author – inimitably Popov. With his composition, rhythms, thoughts and style. Yuri Popov’s arts are instantaneously recognizable. He is not to be confused with anyone else. His canvases are always saturated, concentrated and spread an aura of divine light, like icons, even if the artist portrays neither saints nor obvious religious themes.
Valentina Miromanova, Art historian, an associate professor of the Russian Institute of Theater Arts of Moscow
That portrait is a marvelous trickery and creative composition! The secret to this piece should be unlocked with the theatrical keys. A colorful fantasy emphasized the art, defining the artist’s movement with the lightness that even the hat could take off to the sky. It was as if the artist had dissolved some colors into the hues that are hard to find in nature. Certainly, the painting is a symphony of colors and I can hear that music!
Zhanna Khruleva,
Honored Artist of Russia