‘...I cannot think of anything outside the language. This is definitely the boundary of my consciousness’. This simple crystal-clear idea enunciated by the Russian artist Timofey Radya in one of his last interviews and echoing the famous quote by Jacques Derrida who said: ‘There is nothing beyond the text,’ articulates the initial impulse which brought this project to life a year ago. Between the Lines. Textual in Visual exhibition showcases the textuality phenomenon in contemporary Russian art. The project brings together artworks by 25 artists who employ text as an essential component of their pieces or as a key element of their artistic language. The presented works feature text conveyed through various visual media: from painting to street action, from installation to embroidery. Some pieces build on the conceptual content of the text, in others its plastic form is equally important. It is the text that determines the format of communication with the viewer: be it a stand- alone artistic statement or inseparably fused with the visual component as components of a chemical compound, be it the whole narrative or just a part of it. In 2007, at the Word and Image exhibition Vitaly Patsyukov presented a project bringing to view the dialogue between the visual and the verbal, and the various ways of how it is presented in the works of Russian and foreign artists. Two years later, in 2009, Andrey Erofeev at the exhibition Russian Lettrism. Artists Working with Words: From Conceptualism to Actual Art showed a wide range of Russian artists who used words, letters and fonts in their artworks. These projects postulated logo-centricity as a constant of Russian culture and art. Indeed, text literally penetrates our consciousness, determines our understanding of the world and all the processes occurring there. We could say that adherence to the text is the basis of our cultural identity. The exhibition at the Triumph Gallery pursues this reflection on the text- centricity inherent to Russian art, giving it, however, the perspective of the new generation of artists working in the field of actual art. The pieces from the preceding projects tended to use text as a slogan or a call to action, whereas the artworks displayed at this exhibition rather resemble confessions from a diary. Today text in art has become much more intimate and personalised. We use it trying to penetrate the personal space, where feelings, traumas, doubts, fears, joys — the whole range of what we call emotional, sensual, and frank — can be perceived. This does not mean that these pieces are taken out of the historical and sociocultural context. Conversely, they are the product of their time, presenting a reflection on the actual moment, being at the same time indissolubly linked to the personality of the artist and conveyed in that sincere language, which reaches directly to your heart. As in a room flooded with voices, in the exhibition we suddenly find ourselves in the deafening silence, one-on-one with the author, who engages in a frank dialogue with us by means of the text. And that one shrilling whisper conveys to us the innermost meanings. Artists: Vladimir Abikh, Liza Bobkova, Pasha Bumazhny, Ivan Volkov, Alina Glazun, Alexander Dashevsky, Maxim Ima, Kirill Lebedev (Kto), Kirill Manchunsky, Asya Marakulina, Vadim Mikhailov, Semyon Motolyanets, Mayana Nasybullova, Pavel Otdelnov, Tanya Pyoniker, Ulyana Podkorytova, Slava Ptrk, Timofey Radya, Igor Samolet, Masha Somik, Andrey Siailev, Natalia Timofeeva, Anna Titova, Lada Uchaeva, Valery Chtak. Curator: Polina Mogilina.
Today PARAZIT is one of the brightest creative initiatives in St. Petersburg. This is a kind of creative laboratory, where there is a mutually beneficial exchange of skills and experience with youthful energy. With the main unchanged composition of the group, every year a large number of young talents pass through it, the brightest and most talented works remain in the association. For a new exhibition at MARINA GISICH PROJECTS the members of the association which has existed on the art scene of St. Petersburg for over 20 years are preparing a project about the viewer, imaginary and real. The name of the exhibition is “In Search of a Prepared Spectator”. Or, more precisely, in search of the ideal mediator; fields in space-time, where this mediation between the artist and the viewer will be non-violent and mutually beneficial. By and large, the state of such a search is an immanent property of the union. And then, when it climbs Olympus with all its mass, and when each of its participants goes out on the highway alone. As, however, in all other large exhibitions and projects of PARAZIT. The request for a viewer who is both sufficiently savvy, sophisticated, and at the same time open-minded may seem like a kind of whim; however, this is not a whim, but an urgent need. The social involvement of the activities of the members of the association sometimes pushes them to use polar creative strategies - from the total hermeticity of the created works to their complete transparency, often enhanced by an ironically grotesque "story". However, one gets the impression that this focus on the problem of spectator perception is largely traumatic. The artists seem to say - this is my work, it is carefully reflected and properly executed, what else do you need? Timur Musaev-Kagan Exhibition curators: Semyon Motolyanets, Timur Musaev-Kagan. Exhibition participants: Vladimir Kozin, Semyon Motolyanets, Petr Shvetsov, Alexander Shishkin-Hokusai, Kerim Ragimov, Olga Rostrosta, Igor Plotnikov, Natalia Feofilova-Feting, Vera Svetlova, Andrey Sikorsky, Vladimir Speransky, Vladimir Lilo, Timur Musaev-Kagan, Maria Grabareva, Emilia Sangi , Kolya Sadovnik, Dmitry Zheravov, Tanya Dubovskaya, Anna Ivonina, Natalia Grazhdankina, Ivan Smirnov, Alina Khalitova, Tatyana Pole, Greta Dimaris, Karozich Group, Lukas Shvetsov, Andrey Kabo, Alena Tereshko, Sasha Nefedova, Igor Panin.
Motolyanets is faithful to soap. Having chosen soap as the theme and object of his artistic interest, he has succeeded in creating his own individual mythology. Soap is a constant metaphor, a nuclear mythologem, and also a material the artist works with. Just as for Joseph Beuys fat and wax were an independent, powerful textural element, and also a substitute, embodying the idea and meanings of “social plastics”, an ordinary piece of soap becomes a guide to the world of relevant meanings, manifesting itself as an indicator when launched into the right environment. Perhaps this is also a careful tactic, but it also has an element of irony (self-irony) and necessary critical distance. But soap in itself is an object loaded with various meanings, which usually have a disappearing connotation. For example, the property of soap to slip through the hands gives it a certain similarity to judgments without a clear, fixed line – this is a performative material, which tries to escape and vanish along with water, expressing the flowing and changeability of states. The phenomenology of soap is such that it allows the artist to adjust his attitude, establishing the necessary discourses of judgments. In his new project, Motolyanets gathers together almost ten years’ experience of working with soap, utilizing diverse media he has tried over the past years: painting, photography, sculpture, objects, performance. Significantly, the first works in this cycle, canvases with depictions of piles of soap, were the artists’ response to the mass protests in Belarus two years ago. The political source of the works is not obvious. On the contrary, the towers of multicolored soap bars, in the style of “Richterian photo realism” are a triumph of the world of prosperity and consumerism, glamour and hedonism, and the hypertrophied scale reminds us of the success strategy in the promo images of pop art. The artist turns the aesthetic of “capitalist realism” against itself, working on its territory – and the silent opposition of stretched figures (lying and standing) refers to archaic forms of rituals, traces of which remains in primitive structures – dolmens. Rituals of purification? Stones worn away by time, wind and water, dolmens are synonymous with slivers of soap: the natural and the elemental rhyme with the human and social. There is something childish and infantile in building soap dolmens – a return to archetypical structures, asserting the presence of humans in the world. The name “Children’s Soap” refers us to the works of classics of the Moscow conceptual school, Elena Yelagina and Igor Makarevich, where the adjectives “hellish”, “higher”, combined with an objective, material bearer, take essential properties from predicates. The neutral gender of soap is deceptive, and the artist works with gender differences in language, discovering a pronounced masculine essence in vertical pyramids, but one which is on the verge of toppling over – a confirmation of its instability. In 2014, Motolyanets staged the performance “Mylo Padlo” (“Soap Foul”). Boxes of industrial soap bars fell off a scaffold tower after the artist performed an auto-da-fe in a shining iron halo, hanging himself from the branch of an oak tree. In this staged hanging, the soap bars fell at the same time that the artist died, a significant gesture of breaking with the burden of artistic responsibility, and a kind of purification. This time, the task is different. The artist delegates the performance to different people who are naked to the waist, requiring them to keep a pyramids of soap bars on their heads. This clown performance is a difficult test for maintaining balance, a collective ritual to keep the shaky soap architecture upright. “This is a project about the feeling of guilt, about the possibility of purification and the possibility of washing oneself clean,” the artist says. “About the fact that guilt and responsibility still lie at the basis of the patriarchal world order. The pressure of this incomprehensible responsibility leads to a convulsion of balancing and makes it impossible to go outside the boundaries of the male role without losing balance, i.e. without destroying the structure of the pyramid.” A brief moment of balance is preserved on polaroid and painting, where the diffusion of forms, their dispersal in space, stresses the elusive nature of the events. The artist decided to turn the “convulsion of balancing” into a 3-D form, and thus the sculptures appeared – painted torsos of mannequins with their eyes closed. The result was rather contradictory: the figures are in a state of resigned peace, sunk in prayer or trance, and a pyramid raises their inner view to the sky like a third eye. After passing initiation, they have become priests (or slaves) of an unknown cult – a soap vertical, and they themselves have been partially turned into soap. Painting their bodies in the color spectrum of towers of soap, the artist contemplates the difficulty of combining color and 3-D forms. “The color of soap smoothly merges into the color of the body of the sculpture, not painting the body, but purifying it. The body has its own color, and it also has a color significance that we find difficult to understand - transparency”. The obvious mimicry creates a situation of dependence and subordination, perhaps voluntary, which turns the figures into fanatics of self-purification, depicted at the moment when the soap vertical as an instrument of the pure future has changed their entire structure, making them completely like itself. The rest is silence. Gleb Yershov
The project was conceived by the artist as a report of the creative ideas that inspire the author today. The leitmotif of the exhibition will be a series specially prepared for this show, «Trap for the Visionary». The new series includes works made in the classical technique of painting, the basis for which were photographic observations, photographs in bromo-silver and black and white hand printing, objects, graphics. Semyon Motolyanets was born and began his studies in Brest in DÕSH number 1, finished school number 10 with an artistic bias. After studying at the Minsk Art College named after Glebov, Department of Painting. Higher education in St. Petersburg Art and Industry Academy of Stieglitz (MUKHA). Member of the Union of Artists of Belarus since 2019. The artist actively works in two cities Brest and St. Petersburg, cooperates with the leading galleries of Belarus, Russia, Italy. Of course, the artist has chosen for himself the difficult path of contemporary art, in the field of his activities in this field has been repeatedly awarded prizes and diplomas. His track record includes such awards as the National Prize «Innovation» 2010, Small Prize of the Autumn Salon with Belgazprombank 2014, Prize of the French Institute at the S. Kuryokhin Prize 2018, nominee of the A. Zverev 2021, was included in the top five artists of Russia in 2017 according to FORBES magazine. What will the artist show us in Brest? There will be presented the work of 2022, specially made for the show, as well as deployed a certain retrospective line of work, will be and already become a hallmark of the author's work with the «soap theme», photographic series and large paintings with texts. Here is from the author's direct speech: "The eternal theme of soap, a recurring subject, will unfold here in a certain projection: variations of soap pyramids, unstable constructions, which I have been following for years, the story of the disappearing soap bar and the story of a photogram of soap as a family member, a portrait of soap or its X-ray - a photograph taken as a memory before the final disappearance. All this is shown in an ontological order, to introduce the viewer to the kind of art I have been doing for 20 years, and since my geography of cultural interaction has expanded and I exhibit more often in St. Petersburg, I always want to show a multi-part project of different series in Brest to introduce it to a new public. That is, I want to speed up the process of introducing my art to the viewer. The autonomy of certain works of art, although a conservative move in art, interests me very much at the current stage of reflection, more than project thinking or the construction of a meaningful series. I see the series here as consisting of personal projects. In the sense that this is not the first solo exhibition in Brest, but a logical continuation of the exhibitions I have shown in the city. «Local particularity» (2015) , «Marking public personal space with yellow paint" (2017) , «You can't» (2017) , «I wish I made art every day» (2021) , this time in the logic of these titles I want to call the exhibition «Trap for Visionaries» . Each exhibition is a logical step in continuing the journey of reflection on art, life and historical events.