TSESLER IN HERMIRAGE
Your Tsesler
How time ies! It seems, only yesterday I, a 40-year old designer, while ipping through the pages of the GDR-published ‘Neue Werbung’ (In
the art crowd — ‘Neue Wermacht’, ‘Neue Vermouth’), learn, with joy
and pride, about a shining victory of a Belarusian artist in the largest international poster competition, hosted by the UN in 1986, and today I am — an elderly, grey-bearded, bald-spotted, tired man, who has seen the world and endured much from its beauty — am a direct participant of a suddenly-joyous meeting with this remarkable creator, MASTER and HUMAN.
We drink coffee and wine, remember old mates. Warm and cosy in the Hotel Hermitage restaurant, wonderfully located in a charming green corner of old Brest!.. Conversing, hemming… What I mean is: once, in the year maybe 2012, I got damn lucky and someone brought me, all the way from Minsk, a specimen of a luxurious catalogue-folio with the simple and humble title of ‘ЁЦеслер’…
That’s where I was broken! I was broken from the quality and quantity of ARTISTIC TALENT. As said so fully and precisely by the art critic, Olga Kovalenko, ‘Vladimir Tsesler’s name has long become a brand in modern Belarusian ne art’. Can’t put it better than that!
Methinks, art has that intriguing property to perpetually be in step with the times, as it is created in the image of its epoch, and an artist cannot deceive the epoch… Some kind of invisible neural threads connect the Artist and the spirit of Reform, the wrist, cutter of the creator and the mad harvest of technological change.
Had Volodya Tsesler been born even twenty years ago — he wouldn’t be thinking up his works, full of unparalleled talent, full of freedom and endless humour, but would be stuck in the art dep of a large rm, or just a club, or maybe even somewhere further away… Nevertheless I note this not in favour of the times, but against them: these days, the days
of Vladimir Tsesler, from the Hermitage of Saint Petersburg, the great multitude of museums and galleries of Europe, USA and Japan to the Hermitage in Brest.
In Tsesler’s works the psychological correspondence of the time as such and the time depicted by the master is so precise, that, lacking any idea how he manages to do it all (?!), you’ll understand him completely.
And once you do accept this unmistakable world of Vladimir Tsesler’s art, it’s impossible to live without it.
P.S. ‘…Every time / serves for the matter that is then born in’t.’ William Shakespeare
Lev Alimov, August 29, 2016 Hotel Hermitage, Brest, Belarus
