The authors of this project are conspicuous figures of the Moscow art-scene. Anatoly Osmolovsky is one of the main theorists and practicians of leftist art activism of the 90-ies. At recent years he revised his own strategy and begun experimenting with quasi pop-art objects. Victor Alimpiev is a sophisticated video-artist who makes laconic, emotionally loaded films. He also paints, balancing between abstraction and representation.
The name of their project — Helen’s Shoulders — is the surrealistic metaphor, rhyme of images, which brings together polarities. Helen is the heroine of the Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace novel. She is a spouse of Pierre Bezukhov who suffers in this marriage. She is a beauty and a grand-dame whose body seemed to be covered with lacquer from all the thousand glances thrown at her. For the artists this means the aura of the sublime, the erotic smoothness of the perfect object. At the same time this refers to the object as being polished with the public interest which makes it anonymous, impersonal and therefore ready for even more glances, desires and interpretations.
At this show Anatoly Osmolovsky presents series of sculptural objects called Tickets to Heaven. These are the enlarged, used, public transport tickets, the neutral objects, which seem to be thrown in to the gallery space straight from the sea of the daily routine. They became bigger in size but not enough to turn into the monument sculptures. But exactly because of this size and material transformation (metal instead of the paper), they start to look nicely displaced, meaningfully silent with the loss of their original function.
Victor Alimpiev demonstrates new paintings. They continue his series of the grey-pink abstractions. The change consists of the complexity of colors, of their controlled and dosed proportion and mixture. These paintings do not depict anything objectively existent. They are only hallucinating about the object, and they are oozing with the timid, selfless feeling at its absence and in the waiting of it. The usual pink of the Alimpiev’s paintings gets into the grey color like the subjective emotion which penetrates into the grey film of reality.
The trajectories of the artists crossed at 2004 for the first time (Art With No Excuse project). At the Helen’s Shoulders we see an attempt of the collaboration of the artists bound with the idea of creating self-sufficient, condensed art-work.
Vladimir Levashov
In collaboration with Regina Gallery, Moscow.
