OVCHARENKO is delighted to present a new solo exhibition of one of the remarkable contemporary Russian artists Victor Alimpiev: EVIL EARTH
EVIL EARTH part I
The first part of the exposition is a video EVIL EARTH created in 2018, which will be displayed at the OVCHARENKO gallery. A performance EVIL EARTH that precedes this artwork was created in collaboration with Irina Shulzhenko and was shown to the State Theatre of Nations. One of the leading Gogol Center actresses Svetlana Mamresheva and the head of the vocal ensemble of the Electrotheatre Arina Zvereva, as well as two percussionists Renata Saitova and Ulyana Shcherbakova participated in the project.
EVIL EARTH is an image inspired by anxiety: the modern form of the world, echoing in our hearts with an anxious sense of loss of this very modernity. This is the land that has reared under our feet, forcing us to dance a rather bitter dance and this is a dance of loss of coordination. The rhythm of a drum roll is a desperate gesture of salvation, opposing with an antiresonance to the deafening and imposed rhythm of anxiety.
The excited one finds an unexpected shelter in the tense, pre-thundering work atmosphere, its air about to explode. This is a paradoxical emotion of peace in the midst of the battle that was described by Ernst Junger: “Astonishment can grow enough to overshadow fear: when such a thing happens it’s like a thin veil, which almost always hides the world from us, rises. It is therefore said that calm reigns in the epicenter of a cyclone”.
"It's a fragile, glass peace, but we are still here, My Drummer is ours".
EVIL EARTH part II
The second part of the exposition is located at Vladey Space and is a series of paintings created over the past three years. Alimpiev's figurative style of painting is similar to iconography: each painting shows a face turned to another one as if to the sun; a face with a smile collapsed into a dot; a face held by a rhetorical hand gesture, pronouncing the word "kiss" - becomes a beginning of a new series and is repeated many times.
Once found, each image in the series becomes an imperial imago, a rule for itself and for the rest. A face reminding another one of his power through his sublimated imprint meets the same power opposite him, unleashing a game of refinements. This not yet solidified, still lasting iconography, allows the depicted gestures, touches, smiles to sway, flow and swell.
“First - there is an iconography of perspective and emotions - a work similar to one of an actress during rehearsal. There is a refinement of something “eternal” in this face - finding a static, stapling it. Soaring admiration for your own invisible smile or a bitten lip that pulls the landscape of a face into a dot, like making the sign of the Cross. The found iconography becomes the starting point for repeated drawing, peering is its engine. As you move from drawing to drawing - drawing-peering, drawing invisible meridians on a melting face, washing away everything dense and heavy from this face - a second refinement occurs. Refinement of acceleration. This is a refinement of the orbits along which the gaze, which is reminiscent and at the same time modern to the observed phenomenon, will move. It will move - it will not burn out in the atmosphere, it will not ricochet in the vacuum. This gaze follows a path that ends with a meeting - a meeting with My Drummer, a meeting with Leningradskaya, a meeting with the residual and sublimated - like lightning, which is always a memory. And always is modern”.
Victor Alimpiev
Irina Shulzhenko
