Mikhail Matyushin is an unusually diverse personality, a person endowed with a multitude of talents. Not only an artist, but also a musician, teacher, philosopher and theorist of art. Matyushin belongs to the creation of the theory of “expanded vision” – a complex perception of the world, in which color, sound, form, space and time are interwoven.
A new approach to the vision of the surrounding reality the artist conveys in his paintings. One of the first works in this direction is the painting “Stack. Lakhta”.
Lakhta is a historic district of St. Petersburg, a small village on the shores of the Gulf of Finland. The picturesque nature of Lakhta was once immortalized in painting by I. Shishkin. Matyushin did it radically in the opposite way.
Diagonal sweeping yellow, blue and blue strokes painted the sky as it happens on a turbulent windy day. The landscape is written in broad, expression-filled brush strokes of various shades – from red and orange to blue-green. Multicolor rays converge in the center of the picture, where the red haystack towers. Landscape stripes transmit movement: the stack is supposedly rapidly moving away from the viewer, leaving behind only a multi-colored stream. Diagonals of heaven and earth, multidirectional and contrasting, add to the image an even greater dynamic.
So, in an abstract form, Matyushin expressed the beauty of Lakhta nature he had seen. The task of transferring the real image to the canvas was not before the artist. With his new creative method, he tried to influence the human senses in such a way that the viewer could discover a new vision of the paintings – in a holistic sense of space, time and beauty.