It's not enough to say about Sergey Nikitin's painting that it is intuitive, spontaneous, expressive, abstract with elements of archetypical figurative. Artists with such characteristics follow the venerable tradition of the classical avant-garde, dating back to Kandinsky, Klee, Miro, and others.
It's fair to compare this kind of art to art therapy when the artist is either a patient or a doctor. Dubuffet or Basquiat, who are so close to Sergey Nikitin in their manner, are undoubtedly patients: art treats their existential ailments. But our comrade is a doctor. He came to the art to install into the humankind an overload of sensation, experience, and understanding of life as a value in its nonstop instant to restore its lost ability to be happy.
The psychocorrection tool of Sergey Nikitin is a spontaneous motion technique that helps projecting well-being, emotion, and vision onto the canvas directly, without reflection. The Art interacts with the audience through their observation of the work process, via co-participation in the act of creation, via study of the finished product, which is being structured in front of your eyes from the colorful irrelevant chaos into the rigid composition. And here comes the revelation of the collective and individual unconscious - not one of the displaced traumatic experience, but one of the blissful experience of total pleasure and serenity of an infant.
Sergey's favorite motifs are huge faces, headlegs (typical for kids' pictures of a man with a reduced torso). The connections between the figures are not spatial or narrative, but ones of emotions and experience. Space and time in this mindset are neither the objects of observation, nor the ways of thinking, but something indivisible with the inner world of a sensing and sensitive organism. The depth of Sergey's paintings is not visual, but effective. It becomes clear in the overlaying layers of paint, in lines and spots, exposed one under the other.
Sergey's creative method is reconstructive improvisation, immediate painting on a canvas without a preconceived concept. The end is unpredictable.
By Tamara Zinovieva