Emotion Landscape: 4
Cardinal Points
Russian Center of Culture and Science Nicosia, Cyprus
November 25-30, 2009
Stella Art Foundation, Moscow,
continues in Cyprus the
successful experience at 53rd Venice
biennale of presenting poetry and fine arts as a united whole. The opening of
the show in Nicosia will be accomplished by poetry readings of Cypriot author
Daphne Nikita by the actress Joanna
Siafkalli and presentation of poetical works of Russian authors. A selection of
poems of Daphne Nikita brings a special flavor and feeling for the whole show,
through her poesy the world and life is seen purely in special way of precise
aesthetics and observant feeling, merging beauty and fear, cultural signs and
common details, that encourages the viewer to see the exhibited “landscapes of
emotions” in different light and on another level of understanding.
The exhibition brings together works of four artists from
Russia and Cyprus, who belong
to contemporary art movements that stand quite apart from each other, follow
different artistic principles and employ different methods. Yet, the artwork of
Francisco Infante-Arana, Gioula Hatzigeorgiou, Stas Polnarev and Yuri
Pavlov-Russiaev is based on common subject matter and, while starting it’s
examination from four opposite sides, they move towards one center.
Probably, each one of the artists explores a
world/landscape/city/ physical element/locus that is only accessible to him or
her not so much due to their ability to see and understand the
surrounding reality in some special way, but, to a much greater extent, thanks
to their gift of discerning a transformed image of the world within themselves.
This kind of search for a particularly alert vision is akin to magic: a
capacity to grasp the true essence of things, which, whether consciously or
not, marks their works with a stamp of the artists' access to some special
knowledge. Of course, it always appaers in a very delicate fashion, at the
level of the viewer's implicit feeling rather than an outspoken creative
device. This mixture of an elegance of artistic solutions with a laconism that
is typical of all the four artists, strikes a very harmonious balance in the
structure of their works between non-verbalizable, emphatically aesthetic
component and the authors' message hiding behind it.
Francisco Infante-Arana. From the 2 Lights series. Color photograph. 50x50 cm. 1998
This sort of fluid equilibrium is based on the
features of duality and ambivalence that can be traced back as far as the era
of Romanticism, a movement that was often successfully conceptualized in
contemporary art. At the visual level, it finds its primary expression in all
sorts of contrasts, in an accentuated uncertainty, vacillation of image,
interest to unfamiliar and strange things and states and, especially, in
constant contraposition of light and shadow, inevitably carrying in itself
numerous philosophical meanings, which, however, are not treated by the authors
as a key "clue" to their works. Seen with a "particular"
vision of an artist, our familiar world gets transformed, but the viewer is
only able to testify to this process as a whole, as a phenomenon: the
generalization and geometrization achieved by each of the masters in his or her
own manner doesn't allow for a reduction of the depicted reality to a
mechanical aggregation of details and causal links. Tendency towards
abstraction, slipping away of the clearly visible object and, therefore, an
object lending itself to some sort of classification, suggests an instant
immersion and emotional "empathy" instead of any sequential and
linear "explanation". Manifest things become concealed, living things
become inanimate, the object turns into its reflection, a shadow materializes,
a distortion becomes a fair reflection, and vice
versa. The element of a game behind such visual "tricks" is
intended by artists not so much as a means of an actual playful communication
with the viewer, but, rather, as a self-sufficient method, an image of the artist's own self, keeping the
characteristics of both seriousness and frivolity, the essential
elements of any game, especially if the game is played with the whole world,
even though seen in a miniature.
Anastasia Dokuchaeva
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