Personal exhibition of Victor Alimpiev PIAZZA in VLADEY Space. The exhibition features a video work of the same name from 2018 and a new graphic series. The works gracefully complement each other: the artist creates a world of dreamy contemplation, where reality is felt extremely sensually.
Piazza
The sad guitarist (Alexey Kohanov) seems to fall into the dazed audience, standing motionless in rows in front of him, listening to the elegiac bass. The decadent image and manner of existence are reminiscent of John Frusciante and Jacko Pastorius. A comforter (Viktor Timofeev) is dependent on the guitarist, who keeps him from falling into the hall and finally to himself. The comforter is like a superego representing a fading reason, or like an angel. Their hugs structure the composition. The guitarist falls into the arms of the comforter angel: it happens under the flageolet. The sound space in Alimpiev's works is no less fundamental than the visual one. The third hero — a girl adjutant (Maria Ozhigova) with a dashing saber — with a blow of the blade on the floor from time to time sums up the guitarist's fall into the arms of an enigmatic friend and launches another recursion — new hugs that save him from another fall. The blow of the blade on the floor shatters the diegetic space of the work and at the same time separates the actors playing the role of performers from the performers playing the role of the audience — like a security guard at a rock concert. These heroes form the Piazza space. "Modern art is persisting in the celebration of disobedience. It's like an imitation of a mental disorder, delirium," says Alimpiev, and his film is nothing but a strange, slightly creepy dream, authentic precisely because of its super—realistic absurdity.
"Broadcast lyrical" is how Viktor Alimpiev characterizes his art. His video art works are sketchy. Flesh of the flesh of theatrical, not cinematic dimension. They are born from emotion (and, it seems, as spontaneously as the emotions themselves in the artist's mind) and are finally formed in rehearsals. The scene here is a psychedelic place — a dream metaphor of reality, more real than reality. Victor Alimpiev's video works are extremely corporeal, sensual, erotic. They are saturated not by cinema, but by sculpture, dance, ballet. At the same time, they are mounted in the traditions of the ardent avant-garde. In the Piazza, this clash of theatrical convention with the cine-eye is the most radical, as a result of which this work flashes up in the viewer's head after the fact like a dream and feels, as obviously intended, both continuous and unfinished: it seems that the Piazza can last forever — until the guitarist falls into the hall, and angelic hugs will not be able to save him, and the girl, which stops the collision of the universes of the viewer and the performance, will not cut itself by dropping the saber from his hands. Alimpiev 's poetry cannot pass into the category of prose: dreams are called dreams for this reason, so that, repeating from time to time, it will not turn into reality.
Gordey Petrik
