Vizier, catch the flies!

Exhibition by Diana Machulina at the Gelman Gallery

“Whose fly is this?” - a question formulated by Ilya Kabakov in the early period of his creativity (the title of one of his most famous paintings “Anna Evgenievna Koroleva: “Whose fly is this?” - Ed. ) still remains on the agenda in Russian contemporary art. The young generation of artists strictly follows the precepts of their older colleagues, recognizing loyalty to tradition as a sign of stable progress.

The work of Diana Machulina is one of the best examples of this. The exhibition at the M&Y Gelman Gallery is entitled “Old New”. Realistic painting, stylistically going back to socialist realism and further to socialist art, was adopted by almost all modern successful painters. Whether it is Vinogradov and Dubossarsky, Dmitry Shorin, Maria Pogorzhelskaya - their painting is undoubtedly very different, but their structural link remains the same “great style”. In principle, this is the stage in the development of painting where the object, the signified, is important, and the means themselves, the signifier, are gradually relegated to the background.

Diana Machulina clearly fits into this line, of course, not without a claim to innovation. A palette of various shades of achromatic tones and sepia becomes a visual code for the amber flytrap tape announced as the main character. It seems as if you are looking at the depicted figures through this very tape, as if through glasses with amber lenses. The very name of the exhibition and the work that depicts a Christmas tree decorated with the same adhesive tape best explain what the project is actually about. Russians are used to celebrating two new years, with a two-week break. This time gap was formed during the transition from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. And now we have every right to duplicate our hopes and aspirations, mixed in a glass of champagne and drunk during the chimes on January 1 and 14. But, according to the artist, a contradiction is revealed here. In the opposition material-immaterial, physical-spiritual, there cannot be a situation where the spiritual is so clearly regulated by the physical. Simply put, it is somehow alarming that all the mysticism of New Year’s Eve, in which we all invest in the expectation of the fulfillment of desires, was postponed for two weeks by a single decree of the worldly authorities. All this long-awaited magic, for which they have been preparing for so long, hanging doll angels, putti and other otherworldly helpers, calling on all the good forces led by the bearded Santa Claus to arrange the lives of ordinary people according to their ideas about the ideal, was scheduled for two weeks earlier, and it was planned not by the heavenly office, but by a decree signed by Lenin on February 14, 1918. This was, from the artist’s point of view, the beginning of doubts about the ability of this holiday to give people miracles.

A little girl with huge amber bows made from a flycatcher ribbon, an athlete frozen in an iconographic pose of sacrifice in front of the finishing tape (the same one), a literal metaphor of a news feed in an agency with the same permanent heroes of modern art stuck to it, the above-mentioned allegory tree - everything These monumental paintings by Machulina radically cancel the belief in pleasant fairy tales. Like a VGIK graduate putting into his first film everything he wants to say to the world, Diana is trying to convey a rather simple nihilistic idea in all ways available to her at once. Unfortunately, this gives rise to the rather inappropriate didactics of the Soviet poster about rescuing drowning people and their hands. All the images in Diana's works are a rather cold documentation of disappointment. The athlete's record will be broken, the little girl will find out that Santa Claus is a hired animator, the news released will never change the lives of viewers and listeners for the better. In Gauff's fairy tale "The Caliph the Stork", the main character, having forgotten the magic word, meets a good fairy who helps him dispel the curse. But, having experienced the fear of the irretrievable loss of his human appearance, he radically changes his life upon returning to the palace. He begins to organize his life on his own, finally takes on the management of the state, discarding all illusions about miracles and dreams of dancing with storks. And it no longer occurs to him to shout to his adviser in response to questions about state affairs: “Vizir, catch flies!” Only Gauff’s fairy tale contains so many ambivalent meanings, parallel meanings and other semiotic mysteries that more than one generation of philologists and literary scholars will interpret it and the phrase about flies. Diana's exhibition is much simpler. There is only one statement here, it is on the surface, and all the artist’s defections from the Vinogradov-Dubosarsky camp to the camp of Moscow conceptualists so far speak of youth and the formation of an artistic strategy. And yet, it can already be argued that the new generation of painters has produced a growing star. Of the many young artists working in oil on canvas, Diana is undoubtedly one of the most interesting. And the most pleasant thing about this whole story is to follow its development in the future. Will Kabakov win or will it be Vinogradov-Dubosarsky? Well, for now, on the “Old-New” (respectively), they have a draw.

Andrey PARSHIKOV