🗓️August 7 – September 21, 2014
GROUND SOLYANKA GALLERY
📍1/2 ,Solyanka Ul., Moscow 109028 Russia
◆PA/VE. Painting and Video in the Relationship◆
The relationship between painting and video is tempting to present as a simple connection between the immobile and the moving image. These relations constitute a whole layer or drama extending from the appearance of the first movie frame. In reality, however, everything is far more complex and tangled: in fact, painting from its very beginning contained the potential for unfolding over time—it is fair to say that it is a story compressed into a single frame. With the emergence of cinema, its function had to change, and the two art forms began constantly reacting to one another. We are interested in just one fragment of these relationships, close to our time, particularly relevant at the beginning of the current century, based on the convergence of the two types of art. Their mutual reflection: video as a moving picture; the response to it by painting, including the awakening and self-awareness of its performative beginning. This interaction unfolds very differently—simply because the overlapping territories of these media are extensive and have a dynamic relief.
Video grew out of television imagery, and the exhibition naturally begins with the story of painting’s relationship with television. The specificity of cinematic color television—a key interest of artists wary of pretentious TV and media gloss in the world and themselves—means a transformation of reality. Over time, TV is replaced by the internet and video channels, permeating virtually every visual sphere, and at the same time, so intensively evolving that art can hardly keep up. Yet even watching this lag is captivating.
The main theme of the exhibition is painting brought to life with the help of video. There are infinite variations of this theme, and here two are explored in depth: video panoramas on the topic of existing paintings (K. Lukas, AES+F) and video projection onto a painted canvas (V. Pushnitsky). These are postmodernist approaches typical of artistic consciousness that perceives a classical painting as an archive of meanings. This approach may be subject to critical or ironic rethinking, but at its core, it always contains a love for painting, analysis of hidden mechanisms, and translation into the language of new media.
Apart from these processes are the works of Olga Chernysheva, who works equally with video and painting. At the exhibition, a painted canvas titled Holiday Table is presented next to a video with the same name, and here one can see the fundamental differences between video and painting when transferring a single plot. A similar interest in this difference belongs to Elena Kovylina, but in the interaction of video documentation and painting. Her canvas Peace to the World is adjacent to a non-narrative performance that will be shown at VDNH at the end of the exhibition.
For many artists, including foreign ones, the issue of reflection on the process of creating paintings is important: its duration, temporality, interaction with materials (T. Podmarkova, M. Estna)—because painting possesses a huge number of “generic qualities” that make it exceptional and complex. Over time, painting is leaving—no longer a key type of art, yet its quality is gradually fading.
Exhibition Artists: Olga Chernysheva * AES+F * Aidan Salakhova * Olga Tobreluts * Vitaly Pushnitsky * Anna Franz * Ivan Plusch * Erik Bulatov * Alexey Buldakov * Elena Kovylina * Taus Makhacheva * Tatyana Podmarkova * PusenKoff & PusenKoff (Georgy and Ilya Puzenkovs) * Christina Lukas (Spain) * Max Schvitalla (Germany) * Vlad Yurashko (Ukraine) * Konrad Wyrebek (United Kingdom) * Merike Estna (Estonia) * Bruno Levy & Blake Shaw (USA)
Curator: Sergey Popov (with the participation of Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich and Katya Bochavar)