Artists - Natalia Khlebtsevich (Moscow) and Grigory Kapelyan (New York) showed paintings and graphics, ceramics and installations at the exhibition. Thanks to the variety of techniques, materials and forms, the exposition makes an extremely cheerful impression at first glance and arouses curiosity. Such variance not only entertains, but also distracts from the repetitions that are actually inevitable in contemporary art, creeping out here and there. However, in the case of Khlebtsevich and Kapelyan, this eclecticism is designated by the authors themselves as continuity. As for the origins, both artists refer to the Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century as a direct source of inspiration and the primary impetus on the path to finding their own language in art.
The earliest works by the artist Natalia Khlebtsevich presented at the exhibition are variations on the theme of the famous Suprematist experiments in ceramics by Malevich and Suetin. The graphics and painting of Grigory Kapelyan are a very interesting and original synthesis of constructivism with the organic spontaneity of the Filonov school. It's funny how the style of the Russian avant-garde in the transcription of Khlebtsevich and Kapelyan acquires the character and even the status of the final classic. In these works there is no hint of shocking, breaking traditions, there is no pathos of the organizers of the new world (even if in the fields of art). Deprived of its main emotional component, the style of the Russian avant-garde at the beginning of the 21st century continues to exist due to more or less vivid subjective reflection, as well as experiments with various techniques and materials.
Fortunately, the artists Khlebtsevich and Kapelyan do not limit themselves to the same style. Thus, the ceramic plate, which reveals to the public the famously spiraling text of Grigory Kapelyan, is in fact still alive, but already a story from conceptual searches in the art of the 1960s. This text was written by Kapelyan (who is also a writer) for a book published together with the artist William Brue in 1969 in the amount of 9 copies (the 10th copy would have turned the book at that time from an object of pure art into a prohibited samizdat) … Copies of this edition are now kept at MOMA, and the book itself was reprinted a few years later in France and exhibited at the Center Pompidou next to Sonia Delaunay.
The most recent work by Natalia Khlebtsevich, also presented at the exhibition, is dedicated to the theme of memory and the connection of times. "Biographical data" is a work entirely and completely related to the sphere of values and interests of contemporary art. In dark wood lightboxes, backlit by dim light, in the water, as if in zero gravity, old photographs, membership cards, and photocopiers of some documents float. The set of them is quite random, but immersed in water (the image of both time and oblivion, “they don’t burn in fire, they don’t drown in water”) these random pieces of paper, symbols of memory, make an absolutely mesmerizing impression. In this work, the artist used the latest technologies, “documents” were cast into thin and plastic sheets from a special mass, a mixture of faience and cellulose.
And, of course, the highlight of the exposition is the joint installation of Kapelyan and Khlebtsevich "Word and Deed", already shown at the XIII International Festival of Architecture and Interior Design "Under the Roof of a House" and nominated for the Kandinsky Prize. The wall is made of glazed bricks with inscriptions on them. These are fused pairs of words, such as "day and night", "laughter and sin", "all the time" we often use in everyday speech. Such verbal binomials are like bricks in the building blocks of our language and thinking. In this work, the artists Kapelyan (in this case, in charge of the "word") and Khlebtsevich (apparently, in charge of the "case") tried to achieve a material and convincing embodiment of some important concepts that are present in our everyday life, but which are intangible to us until now. This installation is also simply beautiful - backlit, colored bricks partly lie in heavy masonry, and partly (according to the authors' idea that was not implemented this time) soar in the air. It remains to add that these very verbal binomials are originally an independent literary work of Kapelyan, recently published in his book "Out of Context".
The abundance and character of the texts that fill in themselves, in the literal sense of the word, the objects and graphics of Grigory Kapelyan, illustrates the complex interweaving of artistic traditions and individual history. On the one hand, these texts are a continuation of the experiments of the Russian conceptual school. On the other hand, their abundance is an inevitable consequence of the fact that Grigory Kapelyan is both an artist and a writer. From the third, Kapelyan grew up surrounded by books, texts and fonts. His father was a type designer at the Leningrad Higher Artistic and Technical Institute - a friend of the Moscow VKHUTEMAS / VKHUTEIN. And such rolls and links in art are always incredibly curious and cute. These include the fact that the exhibition of artists, presenting with their work an illustration of the progressive movement of Russian art over the past hundred years, opened precisely on Rozhdestvenka within the walls of the VKHUTEMAS gallery, which is historically the alma-mater of the entire Russian avant-garde.
