Semyon Motolyanets (b. 1982) is an artist of Belarusian origin, who has been living in St. Petersburg for a long time. He has a traditional painting education at the St. Petersburg Academy of Art and Industry named after A.L. Stieglitz combined with the program «School of Young Artist» of the fund «PRO ARTE», Semyon continues to work in the traditional medium of painting, but brings to it a modern method of deconstruction. In addition, Motolyanets is actively developing in the genre of performance art, starting as part of the duo Soap with Dmitry Petukhov, and then engaging in individual practice. Semyon is one of the few who can be confidently called a post-conceptualist. The presence of text in his works plays almost the dominant role. Painting overlaps with textual messages-manifestos, always very ironic and poignant - criticism of contemporary art and the art market goes hand in hand with the theme of the artist's self-identification. As if by inertia, while creating quite traditional works, Motolyanets suddenly appeals to his own mind, burdened with postmodernist consciousness, and deconstructs his works with the help of texts. «Anti-casements» series presented at the exhibition are a contrast to Motolyanets' series of «Casements», in which the text also played a significant role. In his new works, the artist seems to abandon text, replacing it with shards and debris of doors — things, garbage, traces of human life, embodied in the matter. But these things are still the same text, the text of the object, the space of things, their materiality. Using parts of doors, Semyon literally presents a deconstructed object, split into constituent parts. In addition to the «antifortoches», the exhibition includes one of the «Chandeliers», a work from the artist's already recognizable series. In similar works, Semyon also uses text, where the theme of the artist as an art production machine is directly linked to a wide range of current issues in the artistic environment - problems of the production of intangible values, deprofessionalization, and the artist's self-identification again. Lizaveta Matveeva
«Very Artificial Choice» is a new project by artist Semyon Motolyants, which combines works from several thematic series, created especially for the exhibition at Marina Gisich Gallery: primitive skull objects; paintings that take us to the space «on the other side» of the canvas; collages and compositions composed from fragments of working materials. The central part of the exhibition will be a series of sculptural human heads hollowed out of cobblestones. Visually, they create the illusion of the presence of finds from archaic times, accidentally inserted into the modern context. There is a feeling that evolution as such does not exist, that human life is not a path of gradual development and formation, but a mere living in time. Man gets his hands on new tools, but his approach and methods do not change. He tries to chase a moose to satiety, to keep warm with clothes, and so on from day to day. In the contemporary situation, according to the artist, the same thing happens: endless labor for the sake of feeding himself and his offspring with new tools. Something else remains on the periphery, perhaps this art is akin to that created in the primitive era, the purpose of which was not authorship and high style, but an additional pastime and way of organizing leisure time. Hence the interest in a seemingly superfluous element, essentially useless. Semyon Motolyanets: «Observations of how beauty is organized in working interiors have resulted in a whole visual study for me. The decoration that workers make in their rare spare time does not solve the aesthetic problem. It is like a road worker writing his name on the pavement, or a painter trying his hand at depicting something with the remnants of paint. Certainly, as an artist, I am not trying to live up to the image of such a worker. Although my method of work aspires to this form, I do, however, in analyzing the visual work environment, attempt to reconstruct the image and forms, engaging what is «ordinary» that goes unnoticed when viewed from the environment of the creative work process. Here we discover different dimensions of interaction with the same substances. On the one hand, sawdust from the carpenter's workshop becomes elements of volumetric collages, and on the other hand, a composition where it is fundamental that the scrap remains untouched, not transformed, but only composed in space. The interest is only in the fact that it is discarded from production as an unnecessary part of the matter. Considering all these inspiring things, I came to the conclusion that it is necessary to re-select among the seemingly already discarded elements, to conduct an artificial selection and another culling. The paintings in the project also carry an element of rejection, allowing one to look beyond the image and thereby as if to neutralize the thing.» In preparation for the exhibition, curator Kerim Ragimov interviews artist Semyon Motolyants. Ragimov's questions are not directly related to the content of the exhibition, since Ragimov does not know in advance what Motolyanets is working on at the moment, and addresses the field of the unconscious. The dialogue will be presented at the exhibition in the form of correspondence, and the figure of the curator as such in this project «dissolves in a haze,» creating the feeling of an invisible «spiritualist».