V. CHAUS 1940 -2018

Considering the master’s works in the background of the modern Ukrainian painting one can feel on the one hand the connection of Chaus’ creative work with the artistic and ethic tradition of the Soviet times which demanded the artist’s understanding of the social and moral ideal and on the other hand steadfastness of the form conception formed by the people culture. Perhaps the last feature which is in great need in the times of the social and life troubles made Victor Chaus’ work a prominent phenomenon in the artistic life of Kharkov in last years.

In 1970s when he began his active work there was a well-known tradition in the Soviet Art connected with Repin’s creative work, French impressionism and Sesanne. Technique and colors of the artists were translated into the language of engaged form, which had general character and therefore abstract idea of the concrete psychological collisions of the time.

The compositional portrait is one of the most favorite genres of Victor Chaus’ painting. Here he has a great many of successes. The base of it is the master’s attention to the unique of the man’s face, his soul. In times when the portrait genre was nearly dead Chaus developed it in his works traditional by the content but unique by their interest to a person. He made many drawings very expressive for the first time by immediate communication with the nature. May be this communication shows the best creative abilities of the artist – his good attitude to the model his ability to see it as a whole. But a certain monumental and epic tendency, which can be seen in his portraits and drawings, disappears. In the drawing the artists presents the nature with restraint, that’s why the intimacy of the forms sounds as if lowing down but it’s never disappeared forever. The master is in interested in the plastic character of a model, its ethnic peculiarities. He makes, for example, a very expressive series of portrait heads of people from Jakutia. He isn’t interested in ethnic character of the people. He only watch how a person lives, how he or she feels about the world by the head bend or by the expression of the lips and eyes. As many other artists with poetical view of the world Victor Chaus is mainly the artist of women. The bright colors of youth attract the artist, he splashes them in many-figures genre works where boys and girls make a picturesque ornament of a dance. These works demonstrate the classical for the Ukrainian art tendency for the national self-confidence.