Saatchi Art’s Valery Slauk
Valery Slauk is a contemporary Belarusian artist and an honored artist of the Republic of Belarus. He works in book art and easel graphics. He mainly works using the etching technique. Slavic mythology is one of the main themes of Valery Slauk's work. The amazing worlds that he creates exist at the boundary between his literary source material and his limitless imagination. The artist manages to maintain a balance between convincingly recreated reality and fiction. He creates unique compositions that are brimming with a variety of fantastic creatures from folklore that form a unified whole. Soft tonal transitions along with the artist's use of clear lines create volumetric shapes that are fully drawn down to the smallest details. They are interwoven to form intricate ornate letters, which combine to form the images of Ovinniks, Shatans, and Zhytsens. The artist's large format etchings, which are extremely complex in their compositional structure, form a kind of mythological treatise that is set down in visual language. Exact scaling of figures and complex gradations between the different areas in the drawing make it possible to juxtapose numerous figures of flying people, dinosaurs, giant caterpillars, and cats on a single sheet of paper. The artist's depiction of such a surreal and sometimes futuristic world using a virtuoso technique produces a strong impression. Valery Slauk is rightfully considered one of the most important graphic artists in modern Belarus.
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