Translated material
Brilliantly!
The new exhibition season has opened
In the Museum of Architecture named after A.V. Shchusev gallery pARTner project showed Olga Soldatova’s exhibition “Software Mosaics”. In the picturesque ruin - the outbuilding of the Ruin - hang beaded panels and mosaics made of semi-precious stones. They flirt with the monumental style of two empires - Roman and Soviet. One panel depicts pretending to be Pompeian gods and heroes under a ruby Soviet star. On the other, in a rondo against a floral background, there are runners, skaters and jumpers embroidered with bugles, borrowed from the Kurskaya metro station (or whatever). Here’s another picture: a helpful guy with a mustache is trying on a necklace in the form of a plan of some Soviet architectural monster like the Army Theater, which in turn is an allusion to the Roman Baths. A plane was rented from the artist's beloved Alexander Deineka from the Mayakovskaya metro station. Thanks to the generous Soldatova, he flies not only across the beaded panels of the Ruin wing, but also through the bags of Moscow fashionistas who came to the vernissage.And all this imperial pathos rolled into beads and glass bead strings, in general, has nothing in common with nostalgia for the Great (and bloodthirsty, to tell the truth) Style. Despite the romantic rhyme desired by the organizers of the exhibition (the Ruin Hall is the ruins of empires), despite the curation of a true romantic (well, not the last, I hope) of the Russian art community, Arkady Ippolitov, who masterfully embroiders the abbreviations of lost empires in the text of the catalog article, Soldatova’s art evokes truly romantic emotions, what is called perpendicular. First of all, because in Olga’s works the quality of authentic myth-weaving is irretrievably lost (like the secrets of ancient mosaics). But it is precisely this (t)quality that awakens true melancholy and a sense of beauty that reconciles with the empire.
There is no need to seriously talk about the artist’s desire to conduct an inquisitive dialogue with the phenomenally complex ancient mosaic art and even with the bona fide monumental panels of socialist realism.
The context of Soldatova’s work is not romantic nostalgia or even romantic irony, but a new sincerity of defiant “camp”, which appropriates the monumental language of great artistic systems and brings it to the brilliance of glossy posters, gold leaf of bourgeois postcards, “al antique” paintings with odalisques and naked “ Antinous" in nightclubs of all colors of the rainbow. (Was a silhouette like that of Apollo on that mosaic even possible in antiquity? This is some kind of comic!) But without giggling, but with a naive gusto, not ashamed to be considered in bad taste, and precisely in this, defenseless and touching , worldview. Soldatova’s panels will be accompanied by brilliant photographs by Pierre and Gilles, golden embroideries with giraffes and pioneers with oars of Leningrad neo-academicism. Not beauty, but beauty! I never tire of repeating this formula, presented by film critic Stanislav F. Rostotsky. Such skillful artlessness touches some very hidden pockets of the consciousness of the most highbrow intellectuals. Scattering the myths of empires like beads, the artist abolishes those cultural codes that require intellectual and mental discipline. And reconciles us with ourselves. So weak and touching.