Laurent Fiévet ( video installation )
Shunsuke Ohno ( photographs )
Dmitry Sokolenko ( photographic objects )
Natalia Taravkova ( wall fresque )
Curators : Dmitry Sokolenko and Liza Fetissova
When the visible part of a work of art stimulates all our perception channels beyond our senses, does it mean that we are apprehending its immaterial part ? The one that will durably provoke an impact, the one that will erase the memory of the exhibition halls, paced up and down without being touched or seized by what we see ?
What is at stake in « Morphology of Red » exhibition, is that the presented works tend to drag your attention from the images that they use to exploration of knowledge and the memories of the viewer, as well as the affects that they should have inevitably generated. Memory, knowledge and sensations appear from then on in order to offer so many Interpretation keys and modes of approach to the set up devices.
Dmitry Sokolenko, the author of « Morphology of Red », suggests in his project to appeal to the colour of Red, highly symbolic univeral colour, which multitude permits to reveal the immaterial part of the creation more easily.
« Morphology of Red » consists of several parts and the chronology of apparition of each episode is close to « Star Wars » one. Episodes IV, V, and VI have already been shown in Russia, where each time the artists have been invited to think about the question of possible forms of Red.
For « Morphology of Red . Episode I », the Japanese Shunsuke Ohno, Russian Dmitry Sokolenko and Natalia Taravkova, and French Laurent Fiévet meet for a subtle conversation at RTR gallery. True to her/his pratice and discourse, each artist constructs an original work inspired.from and immersed in Red.
The exhibition begins with the observation almost formal of the existence of Red in opposition to other colors. Shunsuke Ohno sees Red as indivisible from the two other Rasta colors - Green and Yellow. By looking at the « Open G » Series, directly inspired from to consumption of green substance, the visitor is kindly asked to look for a precise color on each picture. This experience puts him in a state close to hypnosis, and he keeps on looking for the color in the environment. Thus the discrete manipulation of physical state of the visitor represents the work of Shunsuke Ohno, where photography attend to be be a signal to the sensorial reflex.
For « Morphology of Red » Natalia Taravkova proposes two pieces where the trace of the bubble is visible due to pigment. A kind of vertigo, a drunkenness… But once the painting is finished, euphoria changes into a sad hangover.
Dmitry Sokolenko sets up a complex paradigm around Red, the symbol of conflict and violence. 15 photographic objects, displayed in a geometric order where works communicate visualy and contextualy, each of them covering an iconic episode of History. Thus Sokolenko explores the semantic field of Red, linked to bloody burts– from Saint Sebastien’s stabbed bowels to a poet’s plasma or revolutions, to Stalingrad.
Ink red of Laurent Fiévet is a video installation which ,as often for the artist, rests upon a double register of references, both pictural (The Lacemaker of Vermeer) and cinematographic (Marnie of Alfred Hitchcock). Through a reappropriation and a redeployment of a brief excerpt of an Hitchcock’s movie where Red plays a very expressive ansd symbolic role, the artist proposes a sociological and political reflexion on the absurd and alienating nature of work in its organization and execution rhythms.
