In vetro veritas

Wine and glass are shown in the capital's museums

Last Friday, the Italian Ambassador and his wife had the chance to be in the shoes of an art critic, daily jumping from opening day to opening day in an illusory desire to be the main arbiter of the modern artistic process. The ambassador moved from the Historical Museum to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. He performed an honorable mission - he was present at the openings of new exhibitions prepared with the participation of Italian institutions. One exhibition, in the Historical Museum, is called “Wine Culture.” Exhibits were provided by several Roman museums and, among other things, by the special Wine Museum in the city of Torgiano. Another exhibition was housed in the former building of the Museum of Personal Collections of the Pushkin Museum. It's called "Caution: Glass." Invented and largely financed by entrepreneur Alexander Yesin. Presents works created by contemporary artists at the Berengo Fine Arts factory in the famous center of glass production in Italy - the island of Murano near Venice.

Advertising and pretentious themes promised something very elegant, souvenir and frivolous. However, both exhibitions turned out to be in the genre of philosophical elegy. And their leitmotif is rather the frailty of existence, memento mori. The wine exhibition entered the hall of state symbols of Russia, stylized as an early Byzantine church with mosaics and frescoes on the vaults. The first connotation immediately arose: the wine of the Eucharist, the sacrificial wine. In the most honorable place in the imaginary altar hangs the “Last Supper” of the French follower of Caravaggio, Valentin de Boulogne, who lived in Rome in the 17th century. Another leitmotif is the wine of “symposiums”, ritual wine drinking of the Greco-Roman era, inspired and sanctified by mythical bacchanalia with the participation of the god of wine himself (Dionysus-Bacchus) and his retinue of satyrs and bacchantes. This theme is articulated in engravings and several large canvases by other followers of Caravaggio (according to curator Tamara Igumnova, they wanted to bring “Little Bacchus” from the Roman Borghese Gallery to Moscow, but they didn’t send it - they were afraid after a recent incident with another painting by the master , who returned from a foreign exhibition scratched), as well as in the giant canvas of the academic virtuoso of the Baroque era Giovanni Romanelli “The Wedding of Bacchus and Ariadne”. The picturesque and graphic bacchanalia do not charge with any vital energy. In the twilight of the Byzantine church interior, they are perceived as an edification against a dissolute, hangover life. Moreover, the coloring of the Caravaggists is heavy and disturbing, while the compositions of the Academicians are pompous and static. Add to this series the edifying engraving by Pietro Testa “I don’t find any other pleasure to learn” - an inversion of the plot of “Hercules at the crossroads between Virtue and Vice”: a young man is depicted, tossing with doubt whether he should go left - to books and drawings symbolizing the joy of knowledge and to the owl of Minerva, or to the right - to the wildly merry, drunken company of Bacchus’ companions, personifying carnal pleasures - goat-footed and horned satyrs. Russian folk admonition in this case: “Don’t drink, you’ll become a little goat.”

The most piercing and sad thing is the empty goblets of thinned beauty shimmering in the windows. Their craquelure cracks preserve the memory of warm contact with someone’s fingers and lips, but for many centuries no hot scarlet liquid has revived the frozen shine. It is the glasses that are clear evidence that any holiday comes to an end, that the once full-blooded ceremony of wine drinking has remained only as an artifact of civilization, almost everywhere degenerating into everyday drunkenness.

“Truth in glass” -- In vetro veritas. This motto can be given to the exhibition of sculpture from the island of Murano. The gentle grace of the material prompted most European and Russian artists to present philosophical studies on the theme “Everything is ghostly in this raging world.” The famous glassblowers of the most authoritative creative workshop in Murano, Berengo Fine Arts, helped to implement the intricate ideas. Dane Ulrik Wintersborg chained transparent glass clouds. The Belgian Kuhn Vanmechelen released glass eggs around the world - another chimera of global civilization. The Italian Fabrizio Plessi imitated TV pictures in glass depicting the waves of the Venetian lagoon - in the post-industrial era, the very process of watching becomes a trompe l'oeil. Another simulacrum was created by exhibition designer Sergei Mironenko. He reproduced in Murano glass an elementary microcircuit with diodes and transformers soldered to the plateau. Where is the territory of art today? Not an idle question.

Andrei Filippov and Nikita Alekseev thought about the fragile philosophical truths of existence. A glass skull with a compass in Andrei Filippov’s forehead becomes the first object of a separate “alchemical cabinet”. Another, among others, is the interactive installation “Eight Noble Virtues” by Nikita Alekseev: marvelously beautiful glass balls in holes on a two-level shelf. These balls can be moved and placed from tier to tier. Balls - virtues - celestial spheres. The artist interprets the words of Nicholas of Cusa: “God is a sphere, the center of which is everywhere, and the circumference is nowhere.” In this case, I finally want to prefer “transparency” to the word “ghostly” in relation to cognition.

Sergei KHACHATUROV