Escape and Folly
Par Nikita Dmitriev
Human person contains both characters that unite it with and distinguish – reason and culture – from animals. Although, they are in constant communication, and in practice it is impossible to separate them accurately: biological and cultural factors are simultaneously and inseparably present in such axis phenomena of human existence as love, language, consciousness, violence, power, friendship, etc. At the same time, these phenomena are present among animals, and even if difference between their human and animal versions is substantial and undoubtable, its exhaustive, final definition is impossible to formulate. Every human society, to start from the most archaic tribes( all distinguishing themselves from animals), has its own image of nature – culture relations, both inside man – correlation of rational and animal principles in human person – and outside it: how man and nature interact.
Today, when the Western world and the whole planet lives through the most largescale and unpredictable societal transformation that ever happened – technological revolution, ecological and economic crisis, crisis of family and neurotization of interpersonal relationships, demographic explosion in the global South, the extinction of the global North, the great migration from one to another and the globally rising tsunami of violence – the well-established worldview is being shaken in each aspect. New depths of human cruelty and ugliness, both of animal and rational origin, show themselves. Independence of nature and its well-being from mankind is no longer the case. Bigger importance of biological factor in causality of intellect, deceases, inclinations and attractions, among humans and animals is being discovered. New medical technologies give way to interbreeding of man with animal or cyborg, fabrication of artificial life and direct manipulations with human mind. The omnipresence, the danger and the scope of this transformation, shaking the very basics of human existence, is reflected, consciously or unconsciously, in art.
Anthropological threshold, towards which the mankind is rapidly moving, new and dark world( Agamben named it « coming community »), where all traditional limits – between sexes, nudity and dressing, life and death, times of day, practical activities, statism and movement, spaces, etc. – are exploded, represents Sergey Kononov. His large-scale classic-style portraits and figurative compositions, always of very high technical quality, are fulfilled of sublimated violence, fear and pain. His heroes are semi-nude androgynes without pupils( neither dead nor alive are they), covered by bruises in artificial, neither static nor moving, poses. They are either ready to attack, or attacked themselves and paralyzed. Colors are depressive and frightening. Both cultural principle – man-made material universe – boxing gloves, masks, razors – and natural one – animals, aggressive dogs, exude a threat. Spaces, normally attributed to each of them – open air and home interior – are indistinguishable. Man oppresses and is oppressed. Young girl is a boxer with gooseneck and body of old man. Gigantic bloody catfish with kind and sad human eyes – the only ones in Kononov’ s universe, chipped into pieces, lies in the middle of the room. Devoid of a plot and even detached from any recognizable life situation, these paintings are nightmarish, hallucinatory outbreaks of imagination, or raffinate allegories of the great commixture and the hermetic world of closed spaces, similar to that seen by the heroes wearing the ring of power in Tolkien’ s Lord of the Rings, world of post-everything.
Interest to the theme of shift, mutation of established borders and recomposition of the natural and man-made dimensions, peculiar to our post-contemporary époque, but this time with a sly and playful tone – is shared by Apollinaria Brochet. In a series of
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