| Water is the subject of the best exhibitions of the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg The chief architect of the city of St. Petersburg, which celebrated its glorious anniversary, is the Neva. Without it, the scale, proportions, and rhythm of the City seen by Man would not have been found. The most important thing would disappear - the subject of their dialogue, the element. City: piles, columns, stone, granite, bolt, culture, humility, firmament. Element of water: disruption, chaos, confusion, game, horror, abyss. Deprive St. Petersburg of the Neva, and the struggle of ambition, intrigue, drama, mystery will disappear. Curtain! By the way, this is why St. Petersburg cannot be defined in comparison with anything: Northern Venice there or Amsterdam. Professor Mikhail Allenov rightly noted: only the Neva remains untamed (in the visual mode) inside the classical city, the rest have been curbed.
If the Neva is merciful and caresses, then the city grades the water space, lines, draws, is reflected in the Neva with the dash-dot lines of the facades, pins the successful map with golden pins - towers and domes; and if it happens that Neva is not in the mood, then the city shudders from her touch, backs away, and shrinks to a point. And there is no more support for the eye. Water without end and without edge. Agarophobia.
Actually, this fascinating intrigue of love and hatred of the abyss of the elements and the firmament of culture can be traced today at the exhibition “St. Petersburg. Portrait of the city and its citizens." The most interesting part, in my opinion, is about water. The first two halls. Engravings and drawings of the 18th-19th centuries: Mikhail Makhaev, Alexey Zubov, Kral Beggrov, Sylvester Shchedrin, Fyodor Alekseev. The Neva was filtered through the retina of a particular artistic era and, as a whole, a water epic, an archive, a synopsis took shape. The folds of the Neva are the folds of character - wrinkles or a smile on the face of St. Petersburg. Examples. John August Atkinson, who lived in Russia from 1784 to 1801, loved frontier moods, loved to spy on the wild nature when chaos stirs along the folds of water. And his palaces are mossy, moss-covered yurts, lost in the Asian steppe. No vaunted regularity for you. Loneliness and primitiveness. And Pushkin’s senior contemporary, dear Fyodor Alekseev, breathed the air of Italy in St. Petersburg, and in his vedas the city and water, softly embracing, bask in the golden rays of the midday sun.
Archiving the elements is also interesting in the practice of Contemporary Art. Recognizable visual filters work counter-feeling here. The statement is as subjective as possible. The same proto-language that nature speaks is in demand, but it is packaged in cases with many code locks of civilization and culture. Such suitcases with elements can be seen and even touched at the exhibition of contemporary Finnish-Estonian-Russian art “Poetry of Water” in the Mikhailovsky Castle. Its idea belongs to the director of the Espoo City Art Museum (Finland) Markku Valkonen. Its meaning is fashionable, ecological (environmental protection), and its execution is intelligent and refined. Suitcases containing the elements are scattered throughout the halls. These are Eero Hiironen's objects: aluminum cubes tied with straps. They sparkle, reflect the world and, inside the prim interiors of wise geometry, live their strange totemic life, while paradoxically rhyming with this geometry. Other art objects (a wire house on the imaginary shore of Jaakko Niemel, a lonely sailboat on a blue carpet by Timur Novikov, a video film in a geometric design by Anni Laakso) each time in their own way reproduce the main dramatic collision of the city on the Neva. In an impeccably correct architectural frame, something disturbing, exciting, challenging, threatening both the frame and the rule as such has taken up residence. St. Petersburg archiving of the elements continues. The city lives. Sergey KHACHATUROV, St. Petersburg |
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