Yuri Albert, Victor Skersis. Inappropriate profundity Automatic translate

ILONA-K artspace presents the exhibition of Yuri Albert and Viktor Skersis, which will unfold on two floors of the Mercury Tower, Moscow City. Bound by many years of friendship, the artists work in the field of analytical conceptualism. Their work is not characterized by some common recognizable style, on the contrary, it consists of various projects describing and exploring often completely unrelated phenomena and processes of art. The exhibition will feature over 30 new works created specifically for ILONA-K.

In Yuri Albert’s project "I’m still alive (2018)", the viewer will see a kind of artist’s calendar. At twelve, according to the number of months, the mirrors show the traces of the artist’s misted breath - one for each day of the calendar, as if someone were checking whether the author was still alive, was he breathing? Albert’s project, invented even before the outbreak of the epidemic, turned out to be visionary, asks the viewer about the relationship between the artist and the work: is the work of art an autonomous object, an encrypted message, or is it just a product of the author’s exhaustion?

Talking about the project, the artist reveals the model of art used in it: “Art is not for looking at it, but for thinking about it. As long as we think about it, it exists. As long as it is alive, we have something to breathe. So we breathed a little art for you, so that you have something to think about. And in general, it is interesting: is the painting an image, a mirror of the surrounding life, a message about the truth revealed to the artist, or just a confirmation that the artist is still alive? "

This question, both serious and (self) ironic, echoes Albert’s other works on display, in which he uses cartoons from Soviet and Western authors. Cartoons are specific statements of specific artists, reflecting the views of a part of society in the past. Placing their works in the context of 21st century art, Yuri Albert subjects them to a semantic transformation that turns satire into self-criticism.

According to Viktor Skersis: “Art is a phenomenon of the universe, given to us in an infinite variety of semantic spaces of our thinking. We cannot give a single and only correct definition of art, but we can build models and give definitions to what is called art.

The model presented at the exhibition suggests that art is the manifestation of thinking, it is a dream that everyone can see. In this dream, abstract reflections are presented as concrete images, and concrete objects are abstractions. The play of the obvious and the implied is art! "

The exposition presents two projects by Viktor Skersis: "Do not believe your eyes!" and Patterns. In the project “Don’t Believe Your Eyes,” the artist develops the concept of “Allegorical Abstraction” by the “King of the Hill” group (Y. Albert, P. Davtyan, V. Skersis, A. Filippov), in which the created abstract

the work was endowed with a rather long, as if allegorical, title, for example "Apelles sniffing at Alexander the Great." The title of the work places the abstract picture in the semantic space of the allegory, that is, the abstraction loses the property of non-representativity, which is fundamental for abstract painting, and becomes an image.

In the project "Do not believe your eyes!" Skersis takes the next step - replaces unrepresentative abstraction with pseudo-representational, while preserving allegorical names. So one of the abstract compositions, executed in red and blue tones, is called "The Triumph of Essentialism." The title refers the viewer to the disputes about the art of the middle of the last century and further to Plato’s ideas about the essence of things. It would seem that the transfiguration of abstraction into an image will occur here as well, but the artist’s magic enchants the viewer, makes him read the combination of colors on the canvas not as an image of abstract wisdom, but as an image of a carrot. Calling the project “Don’t Believe Your Eyes!”, The artist demands from the viewer to free themselves from the spell of pseudo-presentation and return to the simple truth: “You just see paints on the canvas”. The problem, of course, is that we usually see thingswhat we think.

In the project "Patterns" Victor Skersis returns to the study of the role of interference of ideas in the creation of new phenomena of art. In this case, oriental ornament and western abstract expressionism were taken as a basis. The oriental ornament is built on repetition. As soon as the pattern is determined, the templates are made, according to which the artist creates the ornament by repeated tracing. This is the philosophical meaning: everything is repeated in this world, everything is predetermined and in this - eternity. The artist’s function is only to accurately fill in what has been prepared. In the west

Expressionism is dominated by immediacy, impulse, unintentionality. These approaches are fundamentally different, but each is valuable. Can they be combined? Skersis approached this problem in the mid-eighties with Project Grid. Patterns is a different approach. Huge canvases are painted in a harsh, brutal manner of monochrome primitivistic abstraction, leaving only the initial impulse to existence from the elements of the pattern, the wild vitality of the pre-existence of eternity.