Translated material
Watch silently!
New exhibitions at Winzavod
Lately I’ve been checking my impressions of exhibitions this way: if after viewing an exhibition a press release is needed to understand what’s what, then it’s not for me. Therefore, discourses with uncomposed plastic direction, playing on foreign fields of creation of endless references and contexts. Fatigue with these belated flowers of postmodernism became evident in many ways at the exhibition of Kandinsky Prize nominees (see Vremya Novostey, September 17) . You have to wait a very long time for genuine plastic accidents. And here's eureka!At Winzavod in the Regina gallery there is a personal exhibition of the world famous German artist Daniel Richter. Mr. Richter works with very worthy institutions around the world. His opuses decorate the spaces of the Saatchi galleries, the Pompidou Center, and the Berlin Martin Gropius Bau. Still, this may not be a sufficient argument to like the exhibition. How many caliphs were riveted for an hour by cunning managers around the world...
In the hall there are only a few, more precisely five, large works on canvas and three small ones on paper. It’s quite enough to experience a shock comparable to that of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Richter’s main characters are not people, not animals, not monsters from the German epic and symbolist poems (as it might seem during a literary “reading” of his canvases), but clots of colorful substance, writhing, suffering, screaming, performing bewitching ritual dances, frantic and all wonderful. From the dough, the flesh of painting itself, Richter shapes a world in which flames, icy cold, smoldering swamp lights either tear space to shreds or freeze it into tapestries of thread patterns. This is the language of painting, the revelation of its internal possibilities. And it doesn’t matter at all who the referent is: symbolism, expressionism, new wild ones, pop culture. All of them are called to be allies, but the artist is with them not as a user, but as a director of his powerful visual performance. And it doesn’t even matter what the pictures are called: verbal designations are as optional as when listening to music. Here it is - the long-awaited event of revealing the possibilities of the language of fine art itself, without cowardly capitulations into related political discourses!
Surprisingly, I entrust the authority of Richter’s main interlocutor at Winzavod to the very young Voronezh artist Ivan Gorshkov, whose exhibition “Parkour” is open at the Start gallery. Curator Arseny Zhilyaev recalled that parkour is part of the modern street epic, the art of free movement in the urban environment for the sake of a rebellious anarchic desire to overcome sanctimonious prohibitions and boundaries. Several abstract, but eager to acquire an anthropomorphic appearance, crudely welded steel creatures are squeezed into a small hall, and on the walls are several pieces of banner fabric. Graffiti with radical words in English is scrawled on them. And the whole composition presents (largely thanks to the extraordinary skill of creating a living three-dimensional form from a deliberately non-plastic, stubborn material) an excellent image of movement as such, the energy of conquering space. This energy is in some ways fueled by the same forces that charge the creativity of Daniel Richter’s compatriot and largely sympathizer, Jonathan Meese. Less chatter - more creation of flesh art!