Above the Wall
published on Feb 10, 09
pencil on paper Conception of the personal exhibition: When Psyche-Life goes down to the darkness, through translucent leaves, chasing Persephone, a blind swallow, with Stygian tenderness and a green twig, hurls itself at her feet. O. Mandelshtam, 1920 (Translated by A. S. Kline) To soar above the Wall. The Wall that separates the Temporary and the Eternal, Existence and Non-Existence, Life and Death. Or to render that wall transparent or immaterial. It is a venture worthy of a true artist. To feel the celebration of grasping an instance that enables contemplating the “anabiosis” of things whereby roses will not come back to life but at the same time will not fade either; and the descending folds of a silk deck will compete in “statue-arity” with their marble counterparts. A realistic to the limits, almost photographic image in the eyes of the viewer can suddenly transcend the boundaries of what can be called an “artistic carbon copy of the reality” and into a new entity. The effect can be observed in the images of some world between the worlds, where beginnings meet the ends and destruction meets creation. Thus, Dionysus’s burial mask with a veritable archaic smile is included into a certain cycle of transformations with a cut-off vine, a cluster of grapes and an oblivion-giving wine to cast off the fetters of finite existence and to brake free into the infinite cycle of perpetual return. The viewer seems to be present at what can be described as apophasis of life through death. “Still”, or rather, “dead” life acquires an ability to talk out ushering into Universum whose roots are archetypal with metaphysics of the shade, the depth of the unconscious, inseparable chaosmos, and the eternity perceived as the time buried… The tentacles of the dry tree branches, the anatomically vivisected crown of a tree, the piercing whiteness of a skull, the detached, as if architectural, landscapes and the silencium of the architecture will evoke sensations akin to those that enwrap him who is encountered with the inconceivable or the supernatural causing him to humbly accept the realities of his daily life. Alexander Sukhovey
