Faibisovich, Semyon Natanovich: The Three of Us – Too Many (From the series, "In front of the Liquor Store") (1988)

Semyon Faibisovich’s painting The Three of Us – Too Many (From the series In front of the Liquor Store) is an example of photorealism. The artist professes that nothing is more interesting than reality. To him the objective representation of reality is an aesthetic as well as moral question. His subject is everyday life; he shows the darker sides of everyday life with great social sensitivity, for instance people standing in long queues for vodka, or crammed buses. The painting The Three of Us – Too Many is part of a series. The piece was created in a peculiar period of the Soviet Union, the era of Glasnost, political and cultural consolidation. Nevertheless, what it represents is not the optimistic mood of opening, but instead it pillories the sad social conditions in the doomed Soviet Union, where alcoholism is a fundamental problem affecting the entire society. The yellowish tone of the painting is characteristic of nearly all of Faibisovich’s works from the time, strengthening the photographic, documentarian effect by imitating the yellow tone of the cheap Soviet photo paper. The artist thus employs American photo- or hyperrealism to his own ends: on the one hand, the representation of reality, and on the other hand, the exploration of the optical and psychological characteristics of vision, which would later become a dominant feature of his work.