Exhibition view

Landscape shielded by the picture.

It’s a kind of a “cool” tautology on the level of unconscious. An endless corridor of curtains. A picture after picture, a frame after frame…A picture is shielding a picture, because landscape is nothing else than another “reflection”. The title’s etymology shows the intention of the author to share with us the sharpened world-view, which Wachowski brothers called “the emptiness of the real”. Even when we are longing to see the “real world” in the end of this tunnel of reflections we cannot do this.  There is no real world beyond the curtains, only these faded, phantasmal, melancholic “pictures”. We are irritated by the artificial obstacles obtrusively invading into our field of view, varying from green fences around constructions sites to omnipresent billboards. However, they are absolutely necessary as therapeutic “image of the enemy”: as long as they are spoiling the landscape, it seems to us that with one more little effort we will be able to move beyond them and see all the breadth of skyline…It is an endless cycle – despite the optimistic forecasts, we are trying to console ourselves with, our skyline is narrowing uncontrollably…

There is an apt metaphor of V.Podoroha about this violent invasion, limitation of the field of view – that is a walleye, “blind spot within the field of vision”. The diagnosis of the time: today the field of vision is covered with numerous “gaps”. It is not only that we don’t understand what is going on, it is that we don’t see, or rather see only fragmentally. Disintegration of reality is occurring step by step and it may not reach its peak yet. Initially media stole our point of view, the right to look at world with our own eyes, and we began to perceive it as “framed”, “cut”, as if through the camera lens. Now we are witnessing the next stage of derealisation – implantation of a “picture” into a body of the real. It is an epochal event. More and more implants appear, leading to catastrophic flattening of the world both in literal and figurative meanings. A picture is false reality, media plane. Number of these clones of reality increases so swiftly that it seems they will totally destroy their “prototype” soon...

Paintings, photos, graphics of Nikita Kadan, Anna Zvyagintseva, Lesia Khomenko, Lada Nakonechna, Dobrynya Ivanov, and Oleg Gryshenko are filled with melancholy, longing for the things that are lost. Melancholy is a key message of their “open air” works. Quotation marks are necessary, since painting on the open air for these young artists is a ridiculous anachronism. Nothing more than an obsolete ritual. It’s impossible to see something that doesn’t exist; the only thing to do is to imitate the picture model, pretending you don’t notice that the king is naked, and create the homogeneous artificial world.

It looks as if whitened not in the light of a sunny day but in the cold light of luminous tubes. First of all, an imprint of reality is losing its richness and truthfulness. Despite the social rhetoric the artists use, trying to show vivid “trash” reality of the preserved in its post-soviet appearance country – spontaneous markets, concerts on a square, police cordons, workers on a plant, urban and rural characters etc – all these banal and predictable things look like scenes from aliens’ life. It’s hard to believe your own eyes, when you are dissolving in the euphoric contemplation… The world is exfoliating in parallel dimensions of real and imaginary (the most strikingly it is emphasized in works of Anna Zvyagintseva).  It is neither “real”, nor “unreal”, if we take these notions separately. But in the same time it is both real and unreal, imaginary-real, virtually actual…
Viktoria Burlaka

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