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Valery
Panteleevich Eremenko (Parachok) (born 1955)

Russia • born in 1955

Biography and information

Valery Yeremenko was born in 1955 in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. In 1976 he graduated from Tashkent Higher Combined Arms College. He has been a retired officer since 1978. In 1980 Yeremenko moved to Kaluga and has lived in this small town ever since. At the same time he first began studying painting. Like many naive artists, he begins by making copies of favorite paintings, but later opens his own painting world - with its own subjects and themes, its own plastic language and coloring.

The heroes of his works are steamboats and steamships, elegant young ladies and gentlemen walking along the blossoming embankments, small houses and amusing animals. The atmosphere of pictures of ParAkhod - a sunny dream-nostalgia, a story about an ideal past of a carefree district Russian small town.

Moreover, the older an artist grows, the more subjects are crowded in his head, waiting for their time. One highly respected art critic has rightly remarked: "A primitive painter cannot be young. To be naive, you have to be mature ...", that is to be attentive enough to be able to discern in an ordinary scene an amusing adventure, to remember and transform, then carry over into the world of their images. Deprived of any pompousness and pathos, ParAkhod's pictures are distinguished by such a powerful charge of freshness and joie de vivre, that the viewer unwittingly gets a concentrated injection of positive energy, a powerful charge of serene provincial happiness. One can feel that Valery Yeremenko sincerely loves the colorful provincial world of his characters; sometimes he mocks them unkindly, and sometimes he envies them kindly, skillfully balancing between kitsch and general happiness that is almost raised to the level of absurdity. And probably all of us, not only the author, sometimes would like to go there, on the other side of the canvas to the paradise of gardens, an eternal holiday, in the cozy streets, the long days without worries, smoothly flowing into the stuffy nightingale, in this beautiful, slightly exaggeratedly sweet Russianness ..

But why such a pseudonym of Parahod, you may ask? It's very simple: firstly, because he inherited love to steamships (his father served in Irtysh steamship line). And secondly, for Valery Yeremenko the steamship is an embodiment of freedom: around water and sky, distant distances, expanses and wind

Valery's works are associated with the classics of naive art, Ivan Rabuzin and Alevtina Pyzhova, who used similar artistic solutions - the careful rhythmic repetition of small details, smooth rounded forms, decorative and symmetrical compositions. The artist has found techniques for simplified images of human figures, green bushes and trees and winter drifts reminiscent of cartoon style, mainly through the use of bright local colors and contoured overlay of shadows. However, Parakhod is an independent and accomplished artist. He has participated in the International Festival of Naive Art and Creativity of Outsiders "Festnaive" in 2007, 2010 and 2013. Solo exhibitions of the artist took place in Kaluga, Moscow, Vienna (Austria).

The artist's works are in the collection of the Museum of Naive Art in Moscow, where most recently held his solo exhibition, as well as in private collections in Russia and abroad.