Chapter 1

Romantic Symbolism

Romanticism is the soul’s freedom.

Only within the soul are we free from circumstances.

The symbol is a sign, a key, a multi-layered code - a passage

into the deeper layers of understanding a painting

If nothing in life happens by chance, then it was my journey
through India that changed me and changed everything. It gave
me a creative impulse. That was pure mysticism. While visiting
one of the temples, I felt an energy that pierced through me, rising
upward and then returning with even greater force. To this day, I cannot
explain what it was. And then came a strange, long dream. Some time
later, already back home, I began to see through an inner vision four
unusual paintings. They seemed complex and, at first, not entirely clear.
In them, I sensed a merging of the cosmic, the biblical, the mystical, and
the earthly.

When I began working on these paintings, I never expected the process to
last twelve years. I turned to photography as a tool to help me. There was
no way to avoid allegory after all, it’s impossible to express on canvas, in
a direct way, what fate is, what love is, what painting means, or what life
truly is.

This work became my answer to the questions that had long been
troubling me.

P.S. I worked with gratitude and with a deep sense of responsibility to the
One who noticed me from the corner of His eye.

The most beautiful nightmare within biological symmetry, or Adam and Eve. An allegory of love

People are like stars in the fourth metadimension, or Like Moses’s forty years of wandering. An allegory of destiny

Renaissance in catharsis, or The path to Golgotha. An Allegory of Painting

Bacchanalia in the temple, or The apocalypse. An allegory of life

ANATOLII

IVANENKO

Selection of the artist’s oil paintings
on canvas, created between 1990 - 2024.