Exposition project by Oleg Kulik.
Mono-log, first-person speech or confession with an open visor – something risky old fashioned looks through in such statement of the topic, it is surrounded by ubiquitous profanity, travesty and ticklish simulacra, densely infested in the space of today's artistic day. However, no. Playing your own face is becoming more and more confident about itself, once materializing in the seductive impeccability of a handsome man Gor Chahal, or in the mono-games by Sergey Mironenko, or in the grinning faces by Dmitry Vrubel, convulsing in connection with and exclusively about his own destiny. Maybe, It is a bacillus of progressive narcissism or a program out of contextuality, arrogantly opposing itself to the protracted political exergies in our art? No. Most likely another – the desire for absolute authenticity of the utterance, which is possible only on the site of one's own self “I”.
Nina Kertselli acts especially in a such – mono-bridgehead, not limited to a small contour of traditional self-portrait, but growing into an all-pervasive mythology on behalf of one's own “I”. All her painting is about herself, more precisely – about feeling yourself in the space of the "overturned" reality and finding the living flesh of "fantasy": literary and historical, naive and intellectually sophisticated, private and universally unconditional. More precisely, what we perceive as "fantasy" and its essence as the antisocial "life", where fact and fiction, fetish and dreams, imaginary and known merge into a single mono-alloy. But the situation of any "mono" always prepares a web of temptations: confession, vulgar revelation and other disruptions with the unconditional distances set in our postmodern time. “Mono Nina” is insured against these failures by a double insurance system.
Firstlн, “mono” –it is also a monochrome – the predominance of the discolored photogenetic scale, which unmistakably holds not only the style of plastics, but also discolors the required degree of inaccessibility of a naked, but hidden "I".
Secondly, of course, the indefatigable Oleg Kulik and his exhibition project "Manege", which introduces the very ease of the game, which guards against excessive immediacy and tear. Beautiful Nina and her daughter inside are inside the universe, arranged only for them, which grows out of pictures as a constituent and fundamental of this mono-world. Someone will say – “banal”, and someone again – “for the second time”. The main thing is – the artist was again offered a difficult, conflicting chance to show not only himself, but an energetic gesture towards self-overcoming.
Olga Kholmogorova
“Nina in the hypostasis of mono”