Petr Shvetsov presents his research into the frontiers of painting on the example of one apparently very simple theme — a landscape with a bog. The texture of the painting undergoes an analysis of its ability to convey the depth of a waterlogged quagmire in which opinions andideas get bogged down. The initial idea for the work was given by the popular scientific book by N.Sukachyov "Marshes, their Formation, Development and Properties", published in Leningrad in 1926. It describes the causes and forms of the deformation of acidic marshy soil, classifies swamps types and species and examines wetland flora and fauna.
For his painstaking studio experiment Petr Shvetsov has chosen the motif of a marshlandscape with a central disturbing apperture —a water source, in the center of which a strange spot of light of unclear origin is concentrated. This haunting image, to which he returned again and again, oddly combines the harmony inherent in the forest landscape, with children's fears of a deep whirlpool. The oily mud bog bubbles up a wonderful mystery into the fairy-tale forest, giving in to an unhealthy obsession with devilry. Do not go into the swamp or the devil will box your ears.
Experimenting with materials and layers of meaning is characteristic of Petr Shvetsov’s creativity in general. In the "Marsh" project, painting comes to the fore, the canvas takes on all the complexity, and the strategy for the conception is regulated almost exclusively by the behavior of the painted constituents. Slowly fossilizing black tar and silver spray, loose and melted substances, magnetic tape and rusting wire, transparent and dense colors, fluid, viscous and thick flows and strokes. The miserly color dissonance imposes from within a muffled rhythm to all possible meanings, rightly asserting that they are generated from the pure drama of paint — the length of the blackened canvas and the narrow whirlpool, striving toward infinite depth. It turns out that the very nature of a bottomless quagmire is akin to the heavy dark beautiful mass, slowly solidifying on the paintings.
Dmitry Ozerkov