Stars in a row – and other ugliness
Pavlovka Gallery is one of the most unusual art places in the capital today. And, perhaps, the most remarkable. Occupying a room painted in coal black color (more recently it was two tiny rooms), at the entrance to the building of the Union of Designers, that on the street. Petropavlovskaya, opposite the famous Pavlovka mental hospital, once a week, the institution receives exhibitions for all comers. The founder and director, Igor Belsky, is practically, as Joseph Beuys, sure: the artist is every person. And selects the authors based on the criteria of talent. And not on the “promoted”. At the same time, all the same, it turns out that the exhibitors are not exhibited in the Pavlovka by any means, not amateurs and scribes. Or, well, a very interesting creative youth – students of art universities from around the world. Or quite well-known domestic photographers and artists. Fortunately, in a strange, more similar to a hybrid of the hut of Baba Yaga and the gingerbread house from the fairy tale about Hansel and Gretel, the two-story building of the Union of Designers rents workshops to the masses of creative people. Including the superstar of the Ukrainian sovrisk Anton Logov, and the very famous photographer, artist, curator, art theorist Alexander Lyapin. The latter was even one of the inspirers of the appearance of Pavlovka ArtGallery. And the gallery began almost two years ago – as a place where pinholes were exposed.
Performances and happenings (spontaneous and not so), photo and painting festivals, reading poetry, listening to music, talking heart to heart on the porch – what just doesn’t happen in Pavlovka! Only boredom and bureaucratic, deadly officialdom, is not here. The money from the “Pavlovsk residents”, however, also almost does not exist, because the gallery is non-commercial. But the people keen on creativity do not pay attention to it. For the obsessed with “prestige”, gloss and “success” of Kiev, such a modus vivendi is something unreal.
The new collective exhibition of the gallery “Disorder of the body scheme” may well serve as a model of what “Pavlovsk” exhibitions are in principle. Let’s start with its name. Yes, yes, you were not mistaken: it was borrowed straight from a psychiatric textbook. “In the structure of depersonalization disorders … traditionally they distinguish: a) as a whole – the loss of unity of“ I ”(own thoughts, voice, movements are perceived by the patient as if from the side; the whole body has changed, doubled, became not the same, before, etc. .) b) distorted perception of separate parts of the body (“violation of the body pattern”) ”. However, the curator, Julia Belskaya, described the same thing more poeticly: “Sometimes it seems to me that wings appear behind my back.” Especially for the readers of Jag.in.ua, Yulia said that behind the name of the exhibition is also a social podkest. “Disruption of the body pattern” is also about social processes in Ukraine and in the world. And also – a conversation about the domestic art market (if there is one, of course, we generally have it, in the traditional sense of the word).
Strange, deformed, Kafkaesque – in general, not very kind, the world appears in most of the works of the exhibition. A surrealistic “naive” painting by Alexander Liapin here is adjacent to the pinhole-photo of Andrey Bondarenko distorting beyond recognition and the multiexposition of Yulia Belskaya herself. The painting of Igor Marchenko reminds us of modernism with its experiments with the “form”. But Yevgeny Korshunov, obviously, beaten the techniques of ar Brut. This is judged by both the color palette and the hyper-eroticism of monstrous portraits. However, behind these ugly faces there is a great pictorial tradition of the twentieth century, including the same Francis Bacon. Yes, and all the work in the exhibition – not without a hint of “tradition”.
Even in life, where people (alas, we are with you!) “Were born to make Kafka true,” there is a place for positive. Have fun, anyway. We laughed for a long time, having learned the background of the work of Oleg Kulai-Kulaichuk with the American flag. On which the traditional 50 stars of the states replace the October Red “stars”. (For those born after the USSR: all primary schoolchildren were wearing badges in the order of the “Octobrist”, after being accepted into the appropriate all-union children’s organization). In 1993 – when, in fact, the picture was created, the artist hoped to buy the right amount of “stars” on the famous “flea” at the then Hay Market in Kiev for a penny. After all, badges with the image of the baby Volodya Ulyanov, the future of Lenin, had recently been issued in millions of copies, all schoolchildren were exactly the same – in general, in order to collect the unfortunate 50 pieces, it was necessary to try harder. But the reality, as always, surpassed the ratio. Already starting to buy “stars”, Kulai-Kulaichuk, to his surprise, found that, although in the USSR they were stamped almost under every bush – the standards, especially, did not adhere.
