Andrey Kartashov, Dankos Burning Heart, 2023, Giclée Print on Canvas

Each epoch leaves its myths and legends for subsequent generations ... Sometimes the turns of mythological history touch so closely that they shine through each other … The title of the picture forms a semantic parallel between the surname of the main character of the film Red Heat, the captain of the Soviet militia Ivan Danko, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the name of Danko, the main character of the legend from the cycle «Tales of the Old Woman Izirgil» (Maxim Gorky). The hero of the legend is the leader of those, having got lost in the darkness, who illuminated the way for desperate and faithless people with his own heart, ripped out from his body. The 90s, the time of the disintegration of the USSR and the fall of the Iron Curtain, was marked by a wave of mutual interest of East and West. The ecumenical militiaman embodied the patterns of cultural perception of those years which took on bizarre, almost fairy-tale forms (which was especially evident in the cinema). The time of the thaw between the two superpowers, captured in art, was rich in historical and mythological archetypes being sometimes soulful, sometimes pretentious, sometimes funny-stereotyped. The main part of the picture is occupied by the face of Captain Danko, who, with a deep compassionate look, peers into the horizon of a certain magical dimension; where the Statue of Liberty with a torch burning like a heart is adjacent to a five-story building decorated with a Hammer and Sickle; where the mythical birds Sirin and Alkonst sing some ancient sacred song and, Alyonushka illuminates the road near the carved terem with a T800 skull; where the Firebird flies into the thicket of fairy tales of the Russian forest, but, as it were, again through some semantic intersection with «Red Heat» against the background of the Statue of Liberty. And above it, in a thundercloud, a Skynet drone from the Terminator hovers. However, it all starts and ends with Danko’s gaze. The transcultural grief of the imperfection of the world and the determination of the hero from the good old Hollywood fairy tale fills the mystical space of the painting with meaning, and the contemplator’s soul with nostalgia for the bygone times of the transcontinental thaw and such multifaceted symbols of the victory of Good over Evil ... Andrey Kartashov graduated from the A. Erdely Professional College of Arts of the Transcarpathian Academy of Arts in Uzhgorod, and later graduated from the Department of Painting of the Repin St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. Since 2007, he has been a member of the Portrait Painters Association of America (PSA), and in 2016, he joined the Union of Artists of Russia. His works are represented in the collections of the Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, Tianjin Museum, and Liu Haisu Museum of Art in China, Arnold Schwarzenegger Museum in Austria, as well as in private collections of collectors from Russia, the UK, the USA, China, Ukraine, Poland, France, and the Netherlands. Produced using more forward-going technologies like the Metis scanner, which allows for printing out excellent quality art pieces it becomes a high-class, exclusive art piece. Excellent art piece in an elegant black wood frame. Width: 161 cm Height: 152 cm