THE COLORS OF SPORTS
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"The Colors of Sports" is a series of paintings about different kinds of sports performed in the artist’s special style combining figurative and abstract elements.
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Nowadays the topic of sports, both amateur and professional, is an essential part in the society oriented towards beauty, health, perfectionism and entertainment. Therefore directly or indirectly the sports has been integrated into our everyday life.

For Kirill Kipyatkov the theme sports has a great importance. His is not interested in sports as a photography or a still image of the sports news report, neither in a reflection of a flickering TV-screen broadcasting the event. For Kirill Kipyatkov the sports is a motivation for creativity and personal practice - rowing, soccer, basketball, volleyball, tennis, cross country skiing, karate.

Undoubtedly the sports means a lot to the artist, as well as to many of us, because sports is about peace and progress, about effectiveness and joy, about generosity, challenge and fairness…

ANDREW KHLOBYSTIN

Art Historian

​Kipyatkov's paintings can be divided into several large thematic series: sports, agriculture, railway, sea, workers, which immediately recalls memories of exhibitions of the Soviet era. At that time, such topics as labor, military and revolutionary history, the Olympics were presented at grand republican and all–Union expositions of social realism artists who made a successful professional and public career. Nevertheless, Kipyatkov's style, combining figurative painting and abstraction, refers rather to the beginning of the last century. At that time, a number of luminaries of modernism, from Picasso to Malevich, after experiments with abstractionism turned back to various forms of realism.

"Realism" is a word that came back in the wave of exhibitions that swept through metropolitan and provincial Russian museums and galleries in 2016 under the influence of dynamically changing socio-political realities. In this context, the work of the young master is interesting for an art historical analysis.

Kipyatkov's presentation of the main topics differs. For example, the motif of agriculture, an activity immersed in native substances, is naturally presented in the most abstract manner. Here, the space ripples after Malevich, shimmers and chirps after Khlebnikov ("Rural Cosmos", "Russian Women", "Ploughmen"), or on the contrary, painting is reduced to lapidary and clearly organized forms ("Sprouts", "Nest", "Harvest"). The disciplined technical world of the railway is constructed by rhythmic way in plastic, reminiscent of Matyushin's color forms (Series "Railway"). The theme of the sea is presented in the most figurative and, at the same time, romantic way, making us to recall the Soviet book illustration and textile design of the 1920s ("Dreams", the series "Icebreakers" and "Tankers").

Indeed, Kipyatkov's painting, that refers to a rich artistic heritage of various styles and schools, provides a vast field of associations for the art historian. They come from Art Nouveau and Klimt, to Suprematism and Filonov, and further through Labas and Deineka, to the post-war painting of Paris school and Leningrad art of the "New Wave" of the 1980s and 1990s - this list can be refined and continued. But, having such postmodern baggage, Kipyatkov's painting is distinguished from the bulk of contemporary art by the absence of drama, "smartness", a sense of "double bottom" in the work, crisis and critical motives, which is supposed to be necessary for "actual" art.

All aforesaid artists and trends in art easily coexist in his painting, as if there were no aching scars on the body of the Russian art history from the former irreconcilable strife that translated artistic problems into the political plane. It is obvious that the composition, the constructiveness of the drawing, additional colors and similar problems, traditional for analytical formalism and the design tendency of Mukhina's school, are more interesting for the artist than actual plots of potato farming or bobsleigh.

In Kipyatkov's paintings, the dizziness of Labasov's optics is boldly combined with the exquisite Sterligov's color ornamentation and the directness of book illustrations: they had been all together transferred to large formats and unusual bases, that looks like aluminum. At the same time, the new art in this painting begins at the micro-level – literally and figuratively. Today, when the ideological and formal foundations of art do not work as they did before, they lose traction and the futuristic project is "hanging", something new is emerging at the level of textures, intonations, shades – micro-changes in matter, sound, psyche, social strata. The reinvention of the language is a characteristic of Russian culture from Lomonosov to the classical Avant-garde and Perestroika. Our era, when the familiar picture of the world is changing again, requires another "reinvention" of the artistic language.

In Kipyatkov's paintings the real, the figure, the plot are combined with an unknown side of life, its sprouts have not yet become complete beings and forms. These substances are embodied in a colorful, non-objective ornament of small geometric "elementary particles" that can overlap with multi-level concepts - a suprematized primary element, sound/note, pixels, digits, icon, symbol, seed, etc. One can assume that the sense of life and technology of new generations, the art of the future, does not necessarily have to be born in agony, and the artist does not have to rush forward as if scalded, as if he is participating in some kind of race. ​

We see that in cruel social situation around us, not only dramatic and antagonistic art projects are being promoted, but many people also like aesthetic, conflict-free versions of creativity of today and tomorrow.