« Blue caterpillar: - … doll …
Alice: - I play with dolls!
Blue caterpillar: - … doll …
Alice: - It's a little doll!
Blue caterpillar: - Nothing like this!!! This is me when I turn. Who are you anyway?"
Alice in Wonderland
A long but narrow wooden platform is built along the wall of the gallery - a little wider than those covered sidewalks that are usually built along construction sites. The entire structure, as well as a row of inclined stone pillars along which the platform stretches, are carefully wrapped in transparent wrapping film. Each and every one of the architects of the bureau reeled up this film for a whole week; it took 30 rolls of film, 50 meters each, one and a half kilometers of thin transparent material.
The shiny surface of the stretched film forms bundles of straight and thin folds, similar to sketching hatching. In some places, where there are many layers, it is almost opaque, in some places it shines through, and somewhere it is interrupted by acute-angled gaps, and then you can see the exhibition inside. Before the opening, all the entrances to the platform were covered with film and the guests of the vernissage wandered around, looking at the exhibits through the film and through the left windows. This is a chrysalis. Cocoon. The architects coiled a cocoon the length of a small house and placed there Alexander Zalavsky's collection of wooden objects.
Alexander Zalavsky collects intricate wooden driftwood and creates wooden sculptures from them. These are roots, in which there are many knots, cones, various depressions, and in places interspersed - by the artist's hands, but it seems that by accident - pebbles and coils of wire turned by the sea, forming ornate swirls around wood bodies. This genre of merging with nature, it must be admitted, was especially popular in the 1980s; however, most of the collectors of that time were limited to cutting birch burls and turning out stumps in the vicinity of summer cottages, followed by polishing, varnishing, and looking for similarities with mermaids and girlish profiles. The roots of Alexander Zalavsky are not like that. Firstly, they are very different: baggy fat men coexist with graceful Martians on slender legs. At the opening of the exhibition, Valeria Preobrazhenskaya said that Zalavsky "… is looking for them in the unthinkable wilds and mountains" - you immediately believe in these words. This is not a simple dacha product, but real treasures. Secondly, all exhibits are non-figurative and abstract. If it is written "The head of a bull", then it does not look like a bull or a head - in abstract paintings this is how it usually happens. Finally, not all driftwood is varnished.
For anyone who has ever wandered the wild beaches of the Black Sea, this collection should remind you of coastal rubbish, dry pieces of wood cut by the sea, mixed with pebbles and traces of civilization. But here, let's say, the cream of the coastal society has gathered, the best and unique examples worthy of an exhibition. It is characteristic that the exhibits are not called either sculptures or works, but a "collection" - this allows to emphasize the miraculousness of the items shown. In theory, we are not dealing with artifacts, but simply facts, samples, such as stones in the geologist's collection: some of them are beautiful, but they owe their beauty to nature. In fact, this is not so: the hand (and eye) of the artist is felt, but you can also feel that the author seeks, if not to hide, then to diminish his interference - he creates images of natural things, slightly improving them. The part of slyness that can be seen here is completely irrelevant: in the TOTEMENT / PAPER installation, these objects play the role of untouched nature, the forms of which are incomprehensible, arbitrary and wild. In some places they are similar to Vrubel's "Pan".
What are natural objects doing in a giant chrysalis? - They are transforming. And what do they turn into? The metaphor of transformation is obvious on the one hand, but not entirely on the other. In a real pupa, the caterpillar, an unpleasant, creeping, slippery or even biting creature, turns into a butterfly, flying, ephemeral, beautiful and short-lived.
The manifesto of Valeria Preobrazhenskaya and Levon Airapetov says: Alexander Zalavsky separated "… fragments of life from the natural environment and turned them into art." So, in an architectural cocoon, life (mundane, knotty, sometimes unpleasant like rusty wire) turns into art? But the fragments of trees, taken from life and put on exhibition pedestals, already by this turn into art. The cocoon may be a beautiful addition to this fact, but in fact it is not necessary for such a transformation. So there must be something else.
And the visitor of the exhibition discovers this something, the protagonist and the culmination of the story, passing the entire gallery of natural objects, at the very end of the path, as it should be. The protagonist of the exhibition is a small model of the Cognac Museum in Chernyakhovka, made by Zalavsky for the project of the TOTEMENT / PAPER bureau. This project, which we recently wrote about, consists of two towers formed by energetic beveled planes. In the project, one tower (museum) is high and iron, and the second (ridge storage) is wooden and will be faced with wood. The layout is the same, one part is wooden, the other is metal, sometimes covered with a romantic rusty patina. The layout is very general, it artistically demonstrates the main idea, the counterpost of the volumes. On it there are no details, no little men, no bushes of a green area; such models are more often shown at architectural exhibitions than to the customer, since this is not a glamorous demonstration, but the quintessence of the found form.
Found and liked the architectural form I want to somehow shade and explain. Surrounding "rootstocks" do an excellent job with this task. They are the exact opposite of the crisp, sharp lines and smooth surfaces of the layout. And they are even more opposed to the energetic energy with which the two towers of the cognac factory carve themselves out of the ground. I would like to recognize the movement inherent in this project as tectonic - this is how rocks come out of the earth during global cataclysms; the tree grows slowly, growing its rings and knots imperceptibly and in silence.
So, inside the cocoon, an arbitrary natural form (almost formless) turns into a rational and man-made one. How exactly this transformation takes place, Alexander Zalavsky showed by arranging a small performance at the opening of the exhibition: he took a saw and began to cut a snag. A straight plane was obtained from a curvilinear one.
But this action is simple, it does not require either a cocoon or the "sacrament of transformation." Probably, the matter is still not only in the transformation of the natural into man-made. Something is still hiding there in this gigantic chrysalis, which is why the natural-clumsy turns into rational.
Strictly speaking, this question is not that difficult. The chrysalis is a metaphor for creativity, when, wandering in a web of vague thoughts among formless images, an architect (aka an artist) finds something crystal, correct and humanly energetic. Installation "TOTEMENT / PAPER" allows everyone to wander among these threads inside the "doll", and find straight lines among the curves.
The exhibition will run at the FLETEXPO gallery until June 5.
An additional exposition "The Doll: The Secret of Emptiness" will take place in the Central House of Artists as part of the Arch of Moscow on May 25-29.
