For its summer exhibition, the Maillol Museum in Banyuls-sur-Mer will present Mykola Tolmachev, the desire for drawing. The curatorship of this first retrospective of the young and mysterious Ukrainian art prodigy will be entrusted to Ulysse Jardat, a heritage curator, musician, and art historian.

What would the genius pencil of a Raphael or Michelangelo have done, condemned to sublime technological absurdity and pornographic banality? A graceful cherub delicately plucking the armpit of an enticing Venus in the mirror (2013), a married couple standing on a gigantic piece of meat as if on a flying carpet (2015), but also, a bleeding cloud (2020) or a commercial airplane with its wings tangled in a wig worthy of Marie-Antoinette, but worn by… Vladimir Putin (2016).

Armed with a stunning technique that allows him to master all the codes of figuration in watercolors that would make the greatest masters of classicism pale, Mykola Tolmachev, although he hasn’t posted on his Instagram account since May 2022, is still followed by over 90,000 people.

His recipe? Images that seem familiar at first glance and captivate by subverting the codes of the disillusioned society embodied by the thirty-something generation. His rose thorns planted in the chest of a teenager, like his matrons à la Toulouse-Lautrec holding the heads of their too-young lovers in their hands, fascinate as much as they embarrass the collective unconscious. The extreme delicacy of the line and the harmony of the colors betray the genius of a technique thought insurmountable since the Renaissance. Or believed outdated since the eruption of the avant-gardes. The enigma posed by each drawing, with its dizzying poetic provocation, never tires the eye: it is hard to resist the enchantment. Through an aesthetics of the seditious that seeks to reveal the pulsional fever of a generation flooded with media vulgarities, Tolmachev bewitches the contemporary eye, which was unaware before him that shock images can still be born from the contact of genius with a simple sheet of paper, to evoke the poetic unexpected.

Drawing is a necessity for Mykola. He attempts to capture the insatiable chimeras of contemporary eros, avid yet condemned to melancholy. These watercolors, though discreet in format, concentrate the essential expression of an extraordinary sensitivity, grappling with contemporary aporias.

In 2013-14, when they were students like him, but on the other side of the Seine at the École du Louvre, Alexandre Lorquin (vice-president of the Maillol Museum) and Ulysse Jardat (curator of the exhibition) both, without yet knowing each other, fell under the spell of Mykola’s timidly hung watercolors in a studio corner at the École des Beaux-Arts. They provided, for the former the soil of a collection born from encounters with artists, for the latter the canvas of a first exhibition of his work.

Now imprisoned in a territory ravaged by war, it is through the boundless imagination of nearly 60 drawings covering a decade of activity that Mykola Tolmachev will be honored with a first museum retrospective, accompanied by a catalog.