The gaze of the white cube

Until December 12, the Personal Exhibition of Vladimir Logutov “The following level” , the next in the “Farewell with Eternal Youth” cycle, operates at the Winzavod. The new exposition sums up the foundations of the modernist vocabulary undertaken by the artist of a decade revision, and also wonders about the effectiveness of the form of the exhibition as such.

Already in his early videos, Vladimir Logutov turned intra -gas installation into a mechanism of manipulations of audience attention, putting technologies on the service of meditative contemplation. In parallel, experimenting in a picturesque medium on the territory of both an abstraction and a figure, invariably resorting to optical illusions, he builds his works as visual provocations. His central question is - what is the artistic form comprehended from, understood as the situation of the meeting of the material body of the work with the view of the viewer?

At the “next level” three main characters are declared: a picture, a spectator and an exhibition. The modern picture appears as a total reflective medium, which is constantly being relaxed, overcomes its own boundaries, and in the case of Logutov, it collects itself from Mimesis microelements, crystallizes in order to ultimately dissolve again. “Real”, self -sufficient paintings at the exhibition are demonstratively absent. There are only images of paintings that have become elements of a holistic work of a wider order, “metro with art”, which at the “next level” is the body of the exhibition itself. This is not a space-frame in which art is demonstrated, but a single artistic space that endows the exhibits placed in it with the status of architectonic elements.

Logutov, as always, demonstrates formal perfectionism - in the verification of compositions, the selection of colors, the general layer of images. It is abundant and diverse both the initial artistic material (from redimides from the workshop to thin watercolor painting), and the technique of its processing (enlarged strokes from the graphic editor are adjacent to the laser sharp in metal). Invariably maintaining a critical distance in relation to mediums, Logutov’s method is nevertheless clearly devoid of ironic condescension to the heritage of modernism and openly recognizes the lasting value of art as such, art in general.

Introduced by faith into this value, the exposition is built as the story of an imaginary life of a generalized work, the emblem of which is a modernist picture. At first - exercises in color and shape on the plane. Then - a merger into the composition in collages format, photo and digital graphics. Small and random elements of picturesque syntax, seized from a creative stream, are freezing here in free soaring. Also further: already formed paintings rest in an airless vacuum in the form of imaginary exhibitions, in order to then be subjected to deconstruction, decay in the form of crumbling soil or skeleton of the subframe, which appears through the canvas in the “surface injuries”. Finally, glossy digital photos of paintings and spectators close the exposition.

Walking through this labyrinth -like visual narrative, the viewer, of course, is not obliged to follow the proposed conceptual logic. But he definitely cannot avoid the game mode dictated by the exposure space. The “next level” reformates the exhibition hall up to the turn of the inside out. In the architectural arsenal of the exhibition - and windows in the walls as gaps on the site of paintings; and walls-mirror, multiplying illusory angles; And, finally, such figures of spatial inversion as a subframe built into the plane of the wall in the back of the wall.

The purpose of all these tricks is twofold. This is the displacement of the accent from the work to the context of its exhibiting, the inclusion of the wall in the picture as its inalienable component. But this is also a multiplication of points of view, angles and prospects, the expansion of the field of vision within the exhibition. The White Cube turns into an optical apparatus of reassembling the audience locus. The viewer here is the central exhibited object.

The mirror, the symbolic center of the exposure, not only closes the subject and the object of observation, but also multiplies the bodies of the audience. A similar role is played by a darkened hall, where a video with silhouettes of characters watching the same video is demonstrated, the heroes of which, in turn, contemplate the white walls of the gallery, devoid of works. The screen is installed in such a way that, together with the room surrounding it and visitors inside, is an object visible from a rectangular hole in the wall. Silhouettes multiplying as a result, the audience embodies the variability of the possibilities and types of vision, forming the collective subject of the exhibition, whose view is not localized and authorized.

Metaphorically interpreting the space of the White Cuba as an entity endowed with internal vision, addressed to himself, Vladimir Logutov and the curator of the exhibition Ekaterina Inozemtseva raise the question of the possibilities and alternative horizons of the perception of a modern exhibition. In their interpretation, the exhibition appears as an apparatus of complex combinatorics of tricks for the audience gaze, not constrained by a single object of observation, but aimed at maximum borders and reflection of distances.