Katerina Lukina. Personal exhibition - Concert in the club "Seeds" Automatic translate

The works of Katerina Lukina are densely populated with various images. Surrealistic characters - either from the paintings of Dorothea Tanning, or from the animated films of Andrei Khrzhanovsky - appear in interiors or against the backdrop of mysterious macabre landscapes, dominating with their fantastic power. They are scattered among abstract lines and spots, evoking associations with their possible prototypes from avant-garde art. The cycle of Lukina’s works, however, does not tell about the avant-garde, but a kind of concert in the Semena club - this is how the first personal exhibition of the artist and the series of works presented at it is titled.

Each scene of this concert appears whole and complete, but its meaning escapes the beholder. The artist leaves no clues hinting at the essence of what is happening. Who is Judy, whose performance starts the concert? Who is playing the “upset piano” that comes into play in the Eleventh Performance after the “kidnapping” was planned in the Tenth Performance? Her - who exactly? The club "Seeds" itself appeared in Lukina’s samizdat book "Murashevsky House" (2019), but this fact - a reference to itself - hardly adds anything to the understanding of her new works.

Works from the series "Concert in the club" Seeds "" (2020-2021) - multilayer reliefs on plywood or through reliefs, sometimes supplemented with metal elements. Images originally created by means of computer graphics were transferred to the surface using ultraviolet printing. The images themselves " were assembled "by the artist literally from scratch - starting from an arbitrary abstract spot on a white screen, which Lukina gave shape, relief and color and surrounded by neighboring images, guided by a plot that was not predetermined (there are no sketches for her works), but relying on an inspiration, momentary feelings and your own inner mood, pushing to choose one or another visual solution.

None of his ideas and images that arise in our consciousness, in fact, do not start "from a blank sheet" and are constructed by the perceived reality, language and order of things. But Lukina refuses to deliberately cite the common and hidden passages of the world cultural archive. The artist elevates the subjective logic of sensations to the rank of a method. Not illustrating my own thoughts or stories, but visualizing Deleuze’s idea of ​​the artist as the creator of blocks of new sensations that are not yet familiar to us, which turn out to be folded and which can be revealed inside the object of art.

How should one look at such works? How to unravel these "tangles of sensations", each of which, although it appears as a self-sufficient, complete, named scene, in fact turns into a phantom of assumed meanings? And the specific details of each work, including the signatures to them, only underline his permanent escape. Perhaps the whole point is in the assembly joints and gluing present in the works at the exhibition? The manner in which the embossed details are attached to the plywood board, and the image itself is folded on several wooden surfaces that have been etched with ultraviolet light fitted to each other? And the scenes of the "Concert" are interspersed with these subtle joints as punctuation marks that give meaning to what has been said?

But if an artist collects his works from a randomly selected fragment, then you can watch them in exactly the same way, clinging to the details snatched from the general whole and “unfolding” the image in different directions, dwelling on specific details or trying to embrace each separate scene of the “Concert "Or the whole" Concert "as a whole. In an article on the politics of installation, Boris Groys characterized art as "a demonstration of… overlooked realities." "The concert in the club" Seeds "" does not return these missed realities to the viewer, but, without revealing their actual image, indicates the very possibility of their existence. Leaving a gap for what was not said, did not appear in speech and did not arrive on the surface. Remaining, according to Groys’s logic, "a space of unconcealment, unconcealment", opposed to the logic of exclusion,hidden behind the imaginary completeness and transparency of the current order of things.

Valery Ledenev

Katerina Lukina (@lukiplotser) was born in 1995 in Mytishchi, lives and works in Moscow. In 2019 she graduated from the Faculty of Graphic Arts of Moscow State University of Printing. I. Fedorova (Faculty of Graphic Arts). Participant of exhibitions in the ISSMAG gallery, the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation, the HERE on Taganka gallery, as well as international projects in China, Slovakia, Poland.