Magic Mountain
2015
XL Gallery, Moscow, Russia

project in collaboration with Svetlana Shuvaeva

The exhibition is a total painting environment: each centimeter of gallery walls is occupied not even with painting, but coloring, freestyle exercises with color and space carried out on paper. Paper, obviousness of its texture, its sometimes bubbled, not thoroughly dry surface separates the authors from monumentalist-decorative experiments, which many artists engaged in, from representatives of the avant-garde such as Malevich and Chagall to Sigmar Polke and Stephan Balkenhol. In a strange way the literal totality of painting reveals a new power of the medium, suddenly discovers some life, some natural energy corresponding to a moment, to a sensation. In Piedmont, among winery slopes there is an amazing piece by Sol LeWitt: a poet of strict iron constructions, elementary figures and distinct combinations of volumes paints up a tiny chapel with mad yellow, pink, blue, not being afraid of ornamentality, weird organics. Abstract planes of pure color live together with the architecture of the chapel and the landscape, with Piedmont’s “magic mountains”: it’s like an absolute counterpoint of life itself, of the natural condition, of some refinement of artistic gesture. It seems that a similar energy is present in collaborative work of two authors as well, but it’s not natural and aesthetic rhythms being synchronized, but organic life itself showing through on the walls of the gallery, building bizarre, incredibly varied patterns of secret life.