A self-taught artist of Russian descent. Active in the fields of poetry (the 1970s and 80s), painting, and drawing (since the late 1970s). His poetry has been published in “Osnowa”, “Odgłosy”, and “Radar”. Conversely, exhibitions of his art have been few and far between. His most influential solo exhibition “Jan Grzegorz Issaieff – A.R.C.H.E.” was presented in Rempex (Warsaw 2007), he also contributed to a collective exhibition “Towards the Apocalypse. The Kiss of Death” at BWA in Bielsko-Biała (1999). According to a popular anecdote, during one of his shows in Łódź, following a heated argument with the sponsor, he cut his paintings off with a pair of scissors, tucked them under his arm and stormed out of the building to the astonishment of the bemused audience.
Since the beginning of his artistic career in the late 1970s, the artist has consistently developed only two ongoing series of works: “A.R.C.H.E.-DANCE” (figurative) and “Mystery” (abstract), with noticeably less focus on the later in his recent work. He is considered a traditionalist painter and has repeatedly expressed reservations with regard to the contemporary trends observed in academic and post-modern art.
Each of his works is a painstaking, deliberate creation reminiscent of a Far-Eastern exercise in calligraphy. The artist is in constant search of the perfect form that would reflect a given spiritual context. He has created his own iconography and formal system that includes humanoid and animalistic figures as well as images of higher beings (angels) and infernal creatures. The artist is particularly skilled in his use of colour contrast, multi-layer and value painting, although employed through a prism of deliberate simplification and devoid of perspective. All of these facets contribute to his highly recognisable and original style.
His drawings typically depict a rationalised, abstracted background reminiscent of constructivist experimentation. At times, he also resorts to writing by including continuous vocabulary ornamentation as well as, less commonly, the expressive albeit equally sophisticated clash of black and white. The world of “A.R.C.H.E” is in itself not a complicated one – a man and a woman, faced with a plethora of primordial deities and demons, engaged in a never-ending struggle for dominance. Neither can exist without the other. They long for each other’s company as, according to ancient mythology, they both descend from a single, ancient being. The female-creatures are sometimes depicted as dangerous, clawed and hooked predators. The men are imbued with sexual potency.
Arche
“Arche”, a drawing on paper in the colour of heavily diluted tea. It depicts two deformed, humanoid figures facing each other. Their silhouettes seem twisted in random directions, their legs deformed, arms lopsided, hands clawed, necks unnaturally long and topped with tiny, simplified heads. The feet of both figures are tiny, spread out respectively towards the right and left of the page. White halos surround both their hears. The shapes – figures are drawn with black contour pen, the outlines are filled with dense, horizontal lines. The background is done analogically – with horizontal, oscillating, densely hand-drawn, black lines. The author outlines each of his drawings with a hand-drawn contour, creating an empty, three-centimetre margin in the colour of the paper. The drawing’s format is approximately 70 x 100 cm.
Arche
“Arche”, a painting on canvas, 40 x 50 cm, in oil. The author makes use of only two colours: dark-blue for the background and red for the figures. Eight shapes– including humanoid and animalistic figures - are scattered all over the canvas, in a highly dynamic way, as if a living presence was caught dancing accross on the canvas. Once can clearly discern heads, short or twisted tails, maws, chicken feet, paws, birdlike shapes. All the figures are depicted flatly, from the side. The artist does not sign his works.
