The exhibition 42/44 consists of monochrome canvases, united by the title "There is no ford in the flame" and a number of objects made of steel and concrete. The series of black and white canvases was created by Vladimir Logutov over the past two years, it is a full-fledged tribute to painting, which was previously present in his work in one way or another, but in a different form: as a means of visual play, and not pure contemplation. Despite the fact that since graduating from the institute, Vladimir has almost never left the canvas and brush, his main focus was concentrated on something else: questions were posed about the relationship with the viewer, about the aesthetics of error and chance, about the interpenetration of art into context and context into art. With such a conceptualist approach, a very wide range of techniques and methods were usually used in the work, as a result of which the works looked as if they were not quite paintings - they drifted from the poster to the object, not allowing the viewer to fully immerse himself in the actual colorful element of the image, keeping both the work itself and the process of contemplation in a situation of ironic suspension.
Such a postmodernist gesture, stopping active emotional self-expression, both on the canvas itself and nearby, in the viewer's zone, was very understandable and relevant in recent years, when intellectual visual culture needed constant demarcation from the mass commercial production of images. It must be said that even in the current, essentially purely pictorial project, the artist nevertheless leaves the possibility of detachment and reflection, but this effect is born gradually, little by little, from within the paint layer itself.
In the series "There is no ford in the flame" the author builds a single pictorial space, some of its features reminiscent of a theater stage, inviting to immersion, to travel. Despite the title, the paintings are maintained in a calm, even ascetic key, the color scheme does not change in a very wide range, sharpening, however, in their final ends, in black and white. From a distance it may seem that we have before us an abstract painting, but this is a characteristic duality of perception, which the author specially creates: upon further examination, in the silhouettes of objects, you can see the outlines of tree trunks and branches, tongues and sparks of flame. The fact that Logutov in the depiction of fire avoids the classical interpretation of its structure, implying different temperature and color zones, and resorts to absolute white, as if using the photographic effect of overexposure of the image - of course, is not accidental. This is a characteristic technique for the artist of introducing an element of non-finiteness, when a white detail seems to be just an unpainted fragment of a primed canvas. On the other hand, on the scale of human emotions there is the highest division, designated by extreme cold, a literal shutdown of feelings due to overexertion: blind hatred, white rage.
The second element of the painting is the landscape space, painted very conditionally, fragmentarily, one can say that all these trees, trunks and roots, executed in various shades of gray, are perceived as purely objective, as only firewood feeding the fire. In the relationship between objects and fire there is no play of reflexes - only a passive static role in relation to the dynamics of white. And at the same time, this gray staffage plays the role of a space marker, creating a three-dimensional environment for the fire.
Finally, at the opposite pole, there is an extremely rare color in painting - absolute black, which Kandinsky considered an ideological marker of the finale: "Represented musically, black is a complete final pause, after which there is a continuation like the beginning of a new world, since, thanks to this pause, the completed is finished for all time - the circle is closed" (V. Kandinsky. On the Spiritual in Art, 1910). And despite the fact that black is present in one way or another in all the works, in two paintings the author shows it as a phenomenon of a fundamentally different order: here it is total black, black as an object.
In the first case, something is indicated on the canvas that can be conditionally called a horizon, dividing the gray bottom and the white rectangle at the top - a black ball or clot of lines is depicted against this background. In the second case, a black figure, reminiscent of a skein of wire, is placed next to the conditional roots of trees. In both paintings, black is present as a foreign flat element above the paintings - this is how Eric Bulatov once played with the space of the painting, introducing a flat inscription "No Entry" above the linear perspective.
The destruction of the conventions of the visual language was carried out by conceptualists of the old school with the help of text, but today the strategy of analysis and deconstruction is based on more subtle formal moves. In Julie Mehretu, this is, for example, a combination of elements of different languages - from a minimalist grid to expressive brushstrokes, Urs Fischer uses surrealist collage in painting. And Logutov introduces frankly two-dimensional graphic lines - like a shadow contour overlapping the landscape, and thus creates his characteristic ambivalence, when the form seems to live in the landscape and fall out of it. Compositionally, the artist uses a black ball as an obstacle, so to speak, a hook for the eye, which clings to it, before smoothly moving along the branches, roots and white outlines of fire. This carries, of course, an element of violence, and carried out from the outside, according to an external will. It should be added that the steel objects on a concrete base, complementing the painting, also carry the idea of dictatorship: spatial tension is created by bending and turning the rail - a beam of a special section, created specifically to prevent such a turn. Curved metal beams belong to the same nature as the black balls in the paintings, they are visual evidence of pressure invading the visual language of art and inevitably changing it. This has an analogy in discursive thinking: when an external slogan or tendentious appeal is introduced into everyday reality. And Vladimir Logutov's painting helps to develop sensitivity and observation.
