Naum Medovoy: Last March

Naum Medovoy’s career spans four decades. A self-taught artist, he was mostly a documentary filmmaker until he began printing stills from his films, applying oil sticks and black and white ink to their surfaces. The resulting works serve as platforms for expressive and perceptual experimentation, which are often selfreferential in nature; Medovoy’s photo-documentary collage paintings are rooted in his childhood memories and previous work. It is this strange appeal of Medovoy’s work-which straddles the line between beauty and grotesqueness-that gives it its lasting influence and afterlife, that grips our throat; or, as George Stevens once declared in talking about film, that bounces off the page and into the viewer’s mind, like something alive and changing. The same thing can be said about Medovoy’s art; it lasts with you long after you’ve left it.