PROVMYZA GERUND
With the sky wide open in the mouth
Many dying remember the day
At the green table
with pink ham
in cool plates
the day ends with a sigh.
Thomas Bernhardt. 15 September, 1957
For the first time in such an exhibition, reminiscent of the liturgical organization of works, "Provmyza" presents in a certain sense what the artists are doing or "serving" - disappearance, washing away, erasure, utopia. Speaking about the state of innocence, which is equivalent to the instability of being, "Provmyza" goes beyond the limits of a possible new world and suggests considering a reality in which a metaphysical image is transformed into the thingness of the earth. The exhibition is organized according to the principle of a temple composition, but there is no altar here. Rather, the principle of the ultimate density of flesh, in which its meticulous decomposition and destruction occurs, is relevant. Just as "Oratorium SARXSOMA" begins with waving an improvised "censer" (a ball of dog and horse ammunition), and its "throwing away", renunciation, so the time of a man falling from a mountain passes from a medieval bodily constructor to the viscosity and amorphousness of flesh. The artists seem to refuse sequence, "shouting out" interjections-dances, dance macabre, in which unbiased twitching plasticity resembles both a convulsion and a movement in a mystical Moorish dance, when six men rotate around a woman holding a ring, creating a strange acrobatic etude, reaching frenzy in movement, just to please and/or become an object of desire.
This flow-spread, molecular connection and again decomposition, is formed into a paradoxical afterlife dark structure, where the dog is not a Cerberus at all, but a part of imperfect nature, in which integrity is violated. A dog barking at a non-existent enemy and trying to climb a completely vertical wall is no longer an allegory, but an obvious displaced layer of space, where any aesthetic allusion encounters the impossibility of interpretation. However, I dare to suggest that such a statement rather counts on a cacophonous reading, on the impact of an empty image, on the superiority of the line or the vulnerability of the geometric figure. As in Merleau-Ponty, in his concept of corporeality, expressed, among other things, in the experience of ambiguity. When two human hands touch each other, when the inseparable superposition of sensations “outside” and “inside” transforms the subject and object into one whole, and then becomes a pictorial or figurative mobile equivalent in its unexcited, alert, but not tense state is embodied in an even more subjective, space-filling reality. At the same time, there are unconditional allusions to an almost literal retelling of Thomas Bernhardt's poem “Decomposition”
If it weren't for these nights, I would be dead,
they raised the howl of dogs in me,
the brain drowns in crying, and the bones rattle,
seeing off the nasty year, the hand trembles,
the grass withers, the towers cut through
the belly of the heavens, the ice cracks on the rivers
and the utopia of the new melancholy of Philippe Grandrieux's films, and even the current structures of Maria Lassing's films, which remain markers of a possible dialogue between space and time. Although the works of "Prommyza" are always in the interpretative field of death and life, they insist on the utopia of transformation, being in a permanent disappointment of a blurred reality with an external extreme focus and manifesting the crackling of the world as a kind of fragility.
A broken horizon, as in "Eternity", an inverted sky, an optical illusion, an illusion, a mirage, and at the same time the cry of a little girl, like stereo sound, a break in the image, an attempt to avoid any interpretation other than the slow rhythm of a melancholic elegy, the agonizing dance of nature and the machine, a "disappointed" technological mechanism or hysteria, or the joy of a child. The shadow of the invisible, the idealization of the world and its overthrow, the tautology of the chimera — these components of the works of "Provmyza" are embodied in a kind of retrospective statement, at least in "Juvenile Sea" — a graphic canvas where, without touching on the narrative and metaphysical component of the buried sea according to Andrei Platonov, one can also notice the image-cast of an unrecognized land or its likeness and denial. The disturbed land, as a prototype of both the priest and the victim, in which the line, its potential fragmentation, the blurring of the horizon, the play with the landscape, and the prophecy of the myth, which makes one imagine another world as an ideal, the existence of which is the suppression of the present one, are merged. Death, disappearance, as mythological punctums of the performative space in which the refraction initially occurred, gives out one of the positions associated with the duplication of the played out situation in the melancholic "Drop", where the subjectivity of the representation is subject to diffusion. Diffusion as a principle of flowing, seething, boiling from the depths of the earth, but at the same time reflecting passion, the pulse of the human body, limited by the chronotope of life, and reincarnated in the "blurred" flesh of a girl. Her body is literally agitated - before turning into nothing, it becomes water, frozen for a moment in its fragmentary, departed passion. Now it is born in the embodiment of water, transformed into steam, into a semblance of drizzle or dew, a frozen sea or fog, also absorbed by the earth. In this magical intercourse of earth and abandoned water, both life and death are expressed, as in the departure of waters both at birth and at extinction. The visual principle, reflecting being as destruction, the dull light, sometimes completely obscured by bodies, which becomes a reflective effect of the agonizing structure of the narrative - everything is subjected here to lofty destruction, a scrupulous abandonment of the remains of being.
Graphic quality, brokenness, the character of the line's behavior imitating, or rather, extremely conveying the melancholy of grief - a feature of the artists' drawing, an effect of Klinger's narration, almost unreproducible in Russian art, where reality is transformed into a cumbersome and tiresome decoration. It is necessary to examine it, to see on one either a face or a bent monk and to betray one's own imagination, striving exclusively for the erasure and freezing of the utopian world, in which the molecule of reality has spread into the sea of oblivion of grammatical construction and the absence of words. The ochre or earthiness of the graphics of "Provmyza" is formed here through the process of preparing the image - through boiling water, that is, evaporation, conscious destruction of its properties, the result of which is the death of both the material and the image. And at the same time, the allusion to interaction with the earth, an attempt to offer a landscape, to discover the horizon line hides the meaning of the eternal whirlpool, the never-cooling pulse in which nature proves its superiority.
January, 2025
by Karina Karaeva
Collaboration of Gallery 9B and MYTH gallery
Many dying remember the day
At the green table
with pink ham
in cool plates
the day ends with a sigh.
Thomas Bernhardt. 15 September, 1957
For the first time in such an exhibition, reminiscent of the liturgical organization of works, "Provmyza" presents in a certain sense what the artists are doing or "serving" - disappearance, washing away, erasure, utopia. Speaking about the state of innocence, which is equivalent to the instability of being, "Provmyza" goes beyond the limits of a possible new world and suggests considering a reality in which a metaphysical image is transformed into the thingness of the earth. The exhibition is organized according to the principle of a temple composition, but there is no altar here. Rather, the principle of the ultimate density of flesh, in which its meticulous decomposition and destruction occurs, is relevant. Just as "Oratorium SARXSOMA" begins with waving an improvised "censer" (a ball of dog and horse ammunition), and its "throwing away", renunciation, so the time of a man falling from a mountain passes from a medieval bodily constructor to the viscosity and amorphousness of flesh. The artists seem to refuse sequence, "shouting out" interjections-dances, dance macabre, in which unbiased twitching plasticity resembles both a convulsion and a movement in a mystical Moorish dance, when six men rotate around a woman holding a ring, creating a strange acrobatic etude, reaching frenzy in movement, just to please and/or become an object of desire.
This flow-spread, molecular connection and again decomposition, is formed into a paradoxical afterlife dark structure, where the dog is not a Cerberus at all, but a part of imperfect nature, in which integrity is violated. A dog barking at a non-existent enemy and trying to climb a completely vertical wall is no longer an allegory, but an obvious displaced layer of space, where any aesthetic allusion encounters the impossibility of interpretation. However, I dare to suggest that such a statement rather counts on a cacophonous reading, on the impact of an empty image, on the superiority of the line or the vulnerability of the geometric figure. As in Merleau-Ponty, in his concept of corporeality, expressed, among other things, in the experience of ambiguity. When two human hands touch each other, when the inseparable superposition of sensations “outside” and “inside” transforms the subject and object into one whole, and then becomes a pictorial or figurative mobile equivalent in its unexcited, alert, but not tense state is embodied in an even more subjective, space-filling reality. At the same time, there are unconditional allusions to an almost literal retelling of Thomas Bernhardt's poem “Decomposition”
If it weren't for these nights, I would be dead,
they raised the howl of dogs in me,
the brain drowns in crying, and the bones rattle,
seeing off the nasty year, the hand trembles,
the grass withers, the towers cut through
the belly of the heavens, the ice cracks on the rivers
and the utopia of the new melancholy of Philippe Grandrieux's films, and even the current structures of Maria Lassing's films, which remain markers of a possible dialogue between space and time. Although the works of "Prommyza" are always in the interpretative field of death and life, they insist on the utopia of transformation, being in a permanent disappointment of a blurred reality with an external extreme focus and manifesting the crackling of the world as a kind of fragility.
A broken horizon, as in "Eternity", an inverted sky, an optical illusion, an illusion, a mirage, and at the same time the cry of a little girl, like stereo sound, a break in the image, an attempt to avoid any interpretation other than the slow rhythm of a melancholic elegy, the agonizing dance of nature and the machine, a "disappointed" technological mechanism or hysteria, or the joy of a child. The shadow of the invisible, the idealization of the world and its overthrow, the tautology of the chimera — these components of the works of "Provmyza" are embodied in a kind of retrospective statement, at least in "Juvenile Sea" — a graphic canvas where, without touching on the narrative and metaphysical component of the buried sea according to Andrei Platonov, one can also notice the image-cast of an unrecognized land or its likeness and denial. The disturbed land, as a prototype of both the priest and the victim, in which the line, its potential fragmentation, the blurring of the horizon, the play with the landscape, and the prophecy of the myth, which makes one imagine another world as an ideal, the existence of which is the suppression of the present one, are merged. Death, disappearance, as mythological punctums of the performative space in which the refraction initially occurred, gives out one of the positions associated with the duplication of the played out situation in the melancholic "Drop", where the subjectivity of the representation is subject to diffusion. Diffusion as a principle of flowing, seething, boiling from the depths of the earth, but at the same time reflecting passion, the pulse of the human body, limited by the chronotope of life, and reincarnated in the "blurred" flesh of a girl. Her body is literally agitated - before turning into nothing, it becomes water, frozen for a moment in its fragmentary, departed passion. Now it is born in the embodiment of water, transformed into steam, into a semblance of drizzle or dew, a frozen sea or fog, also absorbed by the earth. In this magical intercourse of earth and abandoned water, both life and death are expressed, as in the departure of waters both at birth and at extinction. The visual principle, reflecting being as destruction, the dull light, sometimes completely obscured by bodies, which becomes a reflective effect of the agonizing structure of the narrative - everything is subjected here to lofty destruction, a scrupulous abandonment of the remains of being.
Graphic quality, brokenness, the character of the line's behavior imitating, or rather, extremely conveying the melancholy of grief - a feature of the artists' drawing, an effect of Klinger's narration, almost unreproducible in Russian art, where reality is transformed into a cumbersome and tiresome decoration. It is necessary to examine it, to see on one either a face or a bent monk and to betray one's own imagination, striving exclusively for the erasure and freezing of the utopian world, in which the molecule of reality has spread into the sea of oblivion of grammatical construction and the absence of words. The ochre or earthiness of the graphics of "Provmyza" is formed here through the process of preparing the image - through boiling water, that is, evaporation, conscious destruction of its properties, the result of which is the death of both the material and the image. And at the same time, the allusion to interaction with the earth, an attempt to offer a landscape, to discover the horizon line hides the meaning of the eternal whirlpool, the never-cooling pulse in which nature proves its superiority.
January, 2025
by Karina Karaeva
Collaboration of Gallery 9B and MYTH gallery
