Dear Sirs!
In the late nineties of the XXth century Evgeniy Matveev has started with his art experiments in the field of computer art. Research of possibilities to implement the digital technologies in professional art creative process became the purpose of these experiments. It was mentally difficult stage because of necessity to refuse in many respects the whole settled system of traditional art and antagonism of the art professional environment itself.
In 2001 Yury Novikov has joined Evgeniy Matveev. The artists established a creative tandem (further the NewMat group which entered: Marina and Alexey Matveev and Patricia Tokav-Sedh), and with this reinforcement they started to develop absolutely new principles and techniques which weren't applied till now in the digital visual arts.
Authors developed the unique technology of computer painting (even there was a question of registration of the patent for the invention). It was based on essentially new approaches, distinguishing from those existing for that period in the art society. In the majority digital art gained in force in foreign countries, but even there it was of more applying character, and in its basis was the original visual image which is immediately identified as of computer origin (a mechanistic machine image). There was a colossal conflict between the image created by the artist by traditional methods, and machine image. At some stages this contradiction seemed to be insuperable. Therefore in global practice the computer art was occupying an independent space, and could compete only with similar arts, thus yielding frequently a lot to the traditional art on the ideology, persuasiveness and range of targets which are solved by the modern art. Or computer technologies were applied as so to say underpainting for the further processing by classical art techniques and methods.
Basically the decorative advantages of digital techniques were exploited, and most of it led to the lightness, emasculated content and in fact was of amateur frivolous character. In "art" were playing and still play everyone who feels like it, and in 99,9 percent of cases without any understanding what is it in fact. For some reason the average people have got such opinion (at least, in Ukraine) that any visualization it is already an art. Actually it is far from it, to be exact – not at all. The wide access to the computer technologies for painters (and it gets not only into professional hands) has generated the enormous amounts of «scribblers», who came to false idea of being the artists. There is nothing bad about that, but it resulted tons of garbage thrown on the market, and it became difficult to unprepared viewer to distinguish where the true art is and where it is just a kind of mimicry to it, or even some sort of "something" that has nothing to do with real art.
And it became another corner stone which has laid down in a basis of establishing the ideology and techniques of digital painting by professional artists, namely Matveev and Novikov. They understood to perfection what the difference of one from another is. The professional always differs from amateur, and in this case it was necessary to create such a distance between them that at anyone could get doubts even in his thoughts regarding the question who is who. And artists have successfully solved this task.
Evgeniy and Yury applied partially classical techniques as underpaintings to digital painting. That is, have set it all upside down. It was discovered and applied such a number of artistic methods and techniques that their combinations hard to describe. It is shaped like a star with self-sufficient rays and if they are also to be twisted the quantity of combinations is difficult to imagine. Unrestricted application of traditional and modern artistic and non-artistic materials, digital strictness and simultaneously seeming anarchical unruliness, have allowed authors to add to their works of art some unique and absolutely surprising synthetic image.
Now with all confidence we can assume (without discovering the method essentials) that digital painting performed by Evgeniy Matveev and Yury Novikov has established itself. The constant high interest of the art environment to the works of masters is to prove it. Successful and outstanding exhibitions have taken place in Ukraine, Germany, Canada, Holland, Russia, Sweden etc.
To our deepest regret, in 2010 Yury Novikov has passed away.
But life is going on and we do hope to see again the works of art in digital painting from Evgeniy Matveev and his students.
