In the new project, Semyon Motolyanets talks about guilt: «The male figures, the male portraits, are about the guilt and responsibility that still underlie the patriarchal arrangement of the world. The pressure of this incomprehensible responsibility leads to a cramp of balancing and the impossibility of moving beyond the male role without losing resilience, that is, without destroying the structure of the pyramid.» Motolyanets is faithful to the soap. Having once chosen it as the subject and object of his artistic interest, he succeeded in this path, creating his own, individual mythology. Soap is a cross-cutting metaphor, a nuclear mythologem, and at the same time the material with which the artist works.** Just as for Joseph Beuys fat and wax were both an independent, powerful texture and a substitute, embodying the ideas and meanings of«social plastics,» an ordinary bar of soap becomes a vehicle for the most topical meanings, which manifest in it as an indicator, launched into the right medium. This may be a cautious tactic, but it has an element of irony (self-irony) and the necessary critical distance. After all, soap itself is a rather loaded object with different meanings, which usually have a reduced connotation. For example, soap's ability to slip out of one's hands sets a certain direction of judgment without a clear, fixed line - it is performative material, eager to escape and disappear along with water, which expresses the fluidity and changeability of states. The phenomenology of soap is such that it allows the artist to adjust his setting by setting the necessary discourses of judgment. In his new project, Motolyanets brings together his nearly ten years of experience with soap, using a variety of media in which he has proven himself over the years: painting, photography, sculpture, object, performance. It is important that the first works in this cycle - canvases depicting soap slides - were the artist's response to the events of two years ago in Belarus, where mass protests were taking place. The political origins of the works are not apparent in them. On the contrary, the towers of multicolored bars painted in the style of «Richterian photorealism» show the triumph of the world of welfare and consumerism, glamour and hedonism, and the hypertrophy of scale recalls the strategy of success in the presentation of promotional images in pop-art. The artist turns the aesthetics of«capitalist realism» against itself, working on its own territory - and now the silent standing of elongated figures (lying and standing) refers back to archaic forms of rituals, a trace of which has remained in primitive structures - dolmens. Rituals of purification? Stones hewn by time, wind and water are synonymous with washcloths: the natural and elemental rhymes with the human and social. There is something childish, infantile in the construction of soap dolmens - a return to the archetypal structures that affirm the presence of man in the world. Thus, the name of the soap «Children's» refers back to the works of the classics of the Moscow conceptual school, Elena Elagina and Igor Makarevich, where the adjectives «infernal supreme,» combined with an object, a material carrier, acquire from predicative the essential properties. The middle gender of the soap is deceptive, and the artist begins to work with gender differences in language, discovering in the vertical pyramids a pronounced masculinity, though, balancing on the verge of its fall - which becomes for him a confirmation of their precariousness. Once upon a time, in 2014, Motolyanets performed the performance «Soap Falls». The fall of boxes of bars of laundry soap from a building tourney occurred after the artist, in a glowing tin halo, performed an autodaphe, hanging helplessly from an oak tree branch. In that staging of the hanging, the juxtaposition of the falling bars with his own death was a meaningful gesture of breaking with the burden of artistic responsibility, of purification. This time, the task is different. The artist delegates the performance to different people, offering them to hold a pyramid of soap bars on their foreheads, stripped to the waist. The clown number turns out to be a difficult test of balance, a kind of collective ritual to maintain the verticality of the wobbly soap architecture. «This project, says the artist, is about guilt, about the possibility of cleansing and the possibility of washing. About the fact that, until now, guilt and responsibility are at the core of the patriarchal arrangement of the world. The pressure of this incomprehensible responsibility leads to a convulsion of balancing and the impossibility of moving beyond the male role without losing the balance, that is, without destroying the structure of the pyramid.» This brief moment of balance is captured on the Polaroid and in painting, where the diffusion of forms, their dispersion in space emphasizes the elusiveness of what is happening. The «convulsion of balancing» the artist decided to turn into a three-dimensional form - this is how the sculptures appeared - the painted torsos of human mannequins with their eyes closed. The result was the opposite: the figures are in a state of found peace, prayerful immersion and trance, and the pyramid is like a ladder that directs their inner gaze to heaven with its third eye. Having undergone initiation, they became priests (or slaves) of an unknown cult, the soap vertical, and partially turned into soap themselves. In painting their bodies in the pandanic colors of the soap towers, the artist reflects on the complexity of the juxtaposition of color and three-dimensional form. «The color of the soap flows seamlessly into the color of the sculpture's body not by coloring the body in its own meaning, but by purifying it. The body has its own color it also has such a meaning of color that it seems to us complex - transparent.» The obvious mimicry creates a situation of dependence and submission, possibly voluntary, which turns the figures into fans of self-purification, depicted when the grace of the soap vertical as an instrument of pure future has changed their entire structure, completely likening it to itself. Further is the silence. Gleb Ershov