I do not feel like talking about the past: where and how I grew up, what happened to me until now. This is important, but it creates stereotypes that will interfere with the perception of my works. The fact that I have struggled with severe depression for a long time and am still struggling with myself is clear anyway after a slight immersion in my work.

I do not create anything to please someone, I try to put as many signs as possible into the painting, the hooks which you have to catch on to save it in memory, find something only yours in it, see what even I do not see, and then it becomes yours, close, understandable. Human language can explain everything, we must find understanding, live side by side, but looking at this world, I want to remain silent.

I cannot find the words that — like my paintings — are capable of breaking the dam and flooding your minds. I want to look and transfer everything that I see and feel through myself to the canvas — and I do not know where it will lead me.

Oscar Renkel
Manhattan, NYC 2020

Rapid flows of information of the modern world, passing through us every second, masks of social roles, vain hopes and painful expectations plunge us into a mechanical dream that does not allow us to see ourselves as we are, to come into contact with the reality, in order to become aware of ourselves and create.

In his works, Oscar generates his unique world of subjects and symbols, based on the classic pictorial language, creates his own magic schematization of the world in order to grasp it and survive in it. His works tell about the importance of a certain significant moment of initiation of awareness, when every stroke and half-shadow is important, about the complex, tortuous and thorny way that the thought passed from birth to incarnation. A number of works «Coat», «Everyday», «Wait», «Happy Morning», etc., touch upon the theme of complexity of bodily existence, the need to have a meal, get ready, get dressed, make it to your destination through avalanches of the information flow of the ever-vibrating and expanding machine-city, the visual images of which aggressively get into the brain, trying to get caught in consciousness, to impose ready answers before any possible questions, to substitute the reality for false ideas about it, forcing to lead your life in endless painful expectation, horrified by the circumstances and willing to fall asleep even deeper. Moments of awareness open the way to distinguish one from another and tell about it, immerse the spectator into these emotional states of melancholy, routine, responsibilities or escape the clutches of everyday life and see how the colors of the sunset and the rhythm of the city turn the wires and pylons of the Brooklyn bridge into a jazz concert.

The stylistic devices of radical cubism, consisting in decomposition to the simplest elements of everything that can be decomposed, and synthetic cubism, consisting in unification of space and form, seem to continue the Cubistic tradition of chaotic description of the world, however, Oscar's works lack random and decorative elements, and seemingly chaotic composition and improvisational manner typical of graffiti forms up a unique message transmitted through text, image and color. The artistic space of works, organized by bright color spots with dynamic contrasting edges, defining the main rhythm and movement inside the painting, combined with the planes of the multicolored and multilayered background, creates a texture of the painting, vibrating with color and light.

Written by Maxim Timofeev,
Art historian
Moscow, 2018