Oleg Sokolov

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Sokolov Oleg Arkadyevich (1919-1990).

He was born in Odessa city, Ukraine. Oleg Sokolov studied in Odessa School of Arts (1935-1939). After his participation in the World War II, he continued his study in 1947 at the L'vov Institute of Decorative - Applied Art. In a year he returned to the Odessa School of Arts, and was finally graduated in 1951. Since 1955 and up to his death he worked as the art scientist in the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art. In the 50's – he was the only one artist in Odessa, who actively resisted by his creation to “social-realistic” doctrine and the system of “Soviet officious”.

Oleg Sokolov wrote in his poem: "Artist moves in darkness as the mole: He does not know, just surmise... ", - that’s how the artist proclaimed his method of intuition. Oleg Sokolov, was working according to the principle of psychological automatism, and he did not always allow himself to comprehend, what is it came out. The exceptions are just the paints dedicated to his own poems. Frequently "for the name" he was turned to me, to his wife and personal art critic frequently, who became involuntarily his "verbal row". But the main thing - it was turned to all its spectators so that they would argue with his "programs". It occurred, and it is not rare, that they changed names of his works.

They loved to associate with him and each Wednesday in the 60's his apartment in the Stroitel’nyi Pereulok was filled up by friends. This 33 square meters apartment was something like the laboratory of new mentality – the modeling, which entered in a fashion as the "third row of knowledge” according to the principle "construct-check". Oleg Sokolov was constructed and checked himself on others, and no one felled itself as an experimental rabbit, but faster as "co-creator".

Thus it was formed, that the colleges - artists did not take a part of him; another matter - poets, philosophers, scientists. For them he personified the urgent task of the unity of "physicists and lyrics". The philosopher A.I. Uyemov, well-known systemologist, invited him to the seminars for "situation administration". Damask Galeyev assumed that the works of Oleg Sokolov can step over boundaries of theirs own art - into aesthete-therapy and pedagogy. The works of Oleg Sokolov, as Edward Pogosyan considered, could find a use in the energy-information technologies, since it is possible to use thin energies, which put the artist into his pictures, for treating the psychic and somatic illnesses; it is possible to use them, also, in the light-color therapy. Oleg Sokolov, who got to know persecutions and scandalous glory for his "Views of Unknown Stars" (long time prior to the flight Yuriy Gagarin into space), is not yet evaluated on the merit. There is no prophet in its fatherland. And only in Japan (there it was the exhibition of the works of artist) his works were reproduced many times. Entire chapters dedicated to him in Hasegawa Sigiro’s book (Tokyo), who especially separated the "legendary Odessa resident" of his familiars in the former USSR - as was named Oleg Sokolov by A.Titarenko in the catalog "Ukrainian Art of XX Century".

Written by E. Shelestova, Art critic, the Wife of the Artist

Translated by Uriah Prichard from http://www.soviart.com.ua/artcenter/arch/2004/exh2004-09-14/release_u.html

Reed also: Leonardo, Vol. 27, No. 5, Prometheus: Art, Science and Technology in the Former Soviet Union: Special Issue (1994), pp. 427-432 doi:10.2307/1576102

Abstract

The artistic heritage of Oleg Sokolov, Ukrainian artist and poet, is reviewed by his widow, Elena Shelestova. She focusses on his experiments, begun in the 1950s, with the visualization of music and poetry--not on the level of traditional illustration, but rather on that of synthesizing different artistic forms and genres on the basis of a united rhythmic pattern of spatial and temporal structures found by intuition. http://leonardo.info/isast/spec.projects/synesthesiabib.html - Synesthesia in Art & Science