Group show
Five young artists invest the RTR gallery from December 10 for a subtle dialogue. In the right middle of plans for end of the year festivities, at a time when euphoria and happiness are lauded in the media, RTR offers a display of Christmas away from traditional markets selling scented soaps, high-tech corkscrews or Peruvian hats. The department stores drunkenness and the consumer frenzy cease ever a time in favor of a reflection on the strangeness of Christmas. RTR artists chose a challenge to the cheerful carefreeness, imposed on all evening in the year. We remember that Christmas Eve was once primarily a moment of contemplation, a meditation that allowed back in the winter, to symbolically bury the past year and wait for the birth of what would follow. What does it mean today?
Contradicting the kitsch and the glitz, Anastasia Bolchakova offers a visceral idea of Christmas, invoking a spirit of meditation. A Christmas stripped of its traditional trappings, like a whisper, a reminder of the strange, which affects us in the flesh... The socks gifts, skinned alive, the trapped prayer box, or the disinhibited Santa Claus seize your soul.
Marcin Sobolev, true to his committed aim, created birdhouses falsely naïve. With colorful pompoms as underpinning, they have the appearance of toys, but the artist’s purpose is very different: "Sheltered from any industrial zone, block workers grow like mushrooms ... My work comes from the energy that releases the hidden beauty behind these concrete facades... a gateway to the friendliness of these places apprehended as hostile. "Marcin Sobolev, with its houses, tends his arm to warm the general reconciliation.
One can not imagine the celebration (especially the New Year Eve, widely celebrated in Russia) without a "real party", where the pagan sexuality mixes with the fear of the end of the world. The unbridled desires and transferred fears translate differently, according to RTR artists. For Margo Ovcharenko, it’s the malicious complicity of New Year’s Eve or the boxing-day dream.
For Alexander Dashevsky it means the perfect time for a cynical making-up. The "Butterflies" - a collection of small knots taken on women's lingerie - is the story of a man who has adopted a quantitative look on the world. His life turned into hunting grades, classes, levels. His memory is more like a storing data. The only thing that interested him in others is the number of investment that he will give them in his collection. Closed to anyone, without communication. What remains is a silent contemplation of his collection, to which he sadly invites us.
Natalia Taravkova to illuminate the festival, launch a pop-Virus. Her disco-ball, ultimate accessory of disco nights, whose favorite subjects are sex, life and night, bristles with several spines. The bright object attracts us and creates a special atmosphere, even threatening, reflecting with its dozens of little mirrors the famous maxim "Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll," another facet of the freeness of pop culture. Conscious wink to the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic drove the glitter and the musicians’discourse became more political.
Finally, Dmitry Sokolenko reconsider the frantic exchange of greeting cards in perfect opportunity for an artistic act. Passionate about football, the artist sends a yellow card followed by a red card, without indication of sender: a shooting target on the line of conduct! In anticipation of good intentions...
A report on state like no other in the RTR gallery. One more time.
