The city is one of the key themes of painting, which nourished it for many centuries, giving it many ideas: from formal finds to the social and ethical meaning of art. However, recently, or rather for several decades now, the architecture of the city is hardly considered an interesting subject for the artist's work. Rather, the hero of the picture was the “products” of urban reality: the urban atmosphere, situations, feelings. The specific buildings and ensembles that identify the city are rarely reflected in contemporary art. But the city is determined precisely by the specifics of architecture and planning, therefore, the canvases of Evgenia Buravleva and Maria Suvorova open a new discussion about the perception of architecture in modern culture.
Monuments of the past and present in contemporary art, if they do not serve exclusively to create an associative array (identification of a place, event, political context), are very rare. More often they enter the field of photography and cinema, a kind of new media of the 20th century. The reason for this, on the one hand, is in the peculiarities of the development of both visual arts and architecture, starting with the avant-garde, on the other, in the evolution of the perception of architecture.
Traditionally, an architectural monument served in painting to indicate the scene with meanings emanating from this. The last period when specific buildings meant something for this art was in the early 1930s: Deineka placed his heroes against the background of new buildings on the Garden Ring or the project of the Palace of Soviets, and Pimenov wrote "New Moscow" overlooking the Mossovet and the hotel "Moscow". In the post-war period, when a stable image of modern architecture has developed as an aesthetically and ethically negative phenomenon associated with unpopular programs of power structures and / or social phenomena, painting avoids the "product" of new construction, turning increasingly either to nostalgic contemplation of old cities, or to aestheticization subculture living in a modern city (for example, graffiti by J. M. Basquiat, transferred to the format of an easel painting). Architecture was truly realized in cinema (most expressively in late Italian neo-realism) and photography: in the last century, canvas and oil were hardly seen as capable of embodying the aesthetics of glass, concrete, and laconic forms.
In the works presented at the exhibition "City Body", architecture is in the center of attention, but the way it is displayed takes the works outside the boundaries of the format of the traditional urban landscape. It is presented precisely as an artifact of urban formation, fatto urbano, in the sense proposed by Aldo Rossi in his "Architecture of the City". The buildings here are like a sign that identifies a place, but not only. In the works of Evgenia Buravleva, one can talk about the environment, in the works of Maria Suvora - about the state, but the unifying message to the viewer consists precisely in the invitation to feel the architectural object or ensemble, the totality of urban “given”, to realize their influence on oneself - and its influence on them. The architecture of the city forms routes, moods, provokes situations, creates emotions; but, at the same time, all this is created by people, different and at different times. The influence of architecture, urban structure is not the main perceived sensation of a metropolitan resident, but is perceived indirectly; the works presented here emphasize this influence.
Views of London by Evgeniya Buravleva - an urban planning study of an object by means of painting: a kind of visualization of the environmental and emotional effect of a structure, perceived in the context of its architectural and atmospheric environment. What architects and city planners do (or should do) before the implementation of the object, the artist here uses paints, however, a posteriori. It is significant that the paint remains paint, spreading over the surface of the canvas, turning into color, sometimes ignoring the details depicted - the outline of buildings, figures of people that determine the scale. Thus, the actual "made" of the picture, the duality of the image and the depicted, the analytical nature of the work, with all its fullness with the feeling of a spontaneous impression, is emphasized, which is a direct metaphor for the urban organism in the process of its formation and the effect it subsequently produces.
The city of Maria Suvorova is deliberately fragmentary, and its fragments are symbolic. Moreover, it structures and systematizes the urban space, creating genera and types of its formations, distinguishing and emphasizing its composition. Here the color is minimal (as the memory of the color in the city of its inhabitant is almost always minimal), the forms are extremely simplified. Her works are signs, the result of numerous frames of perception that remain with a city dweller or traveler, with a bare structure, reinforced with meanings.
The poetics of these works is the result of comprehending personal impressions, which again demonstrates the rare interest of artists in architecture, and not in more predictable views and panoramas. In the dictionary of the pictorial language of each author there is a cultural base. So, in the works of Eugenia Buravleva, William Turner is present, but also expressionism of the 20th century, and Poussin's color gradations. Maria Suvorova's painting recalls the experience of Italian metaphysicians, primarily Giorgio De Chirico, but also the textures of Alberto Burri and Anselm Kiefer. A modern artist, whatever direction he belongs to, understands and interprets the meanings of "influences" and "borrowings", using them as an additional means of expression.
The architecture depicted in the canvases presented here often had a complex history, was not always accepted by society, rejected by the townspeople: "Stalinist" high-rise buildings, the Swiss Re skyscraper in London. However, the works presented to us indicate that these objects live in consciousness and are capable of being perceived and reproduced by means of painting. These buildings get used to the urban landscape, organically growing into it - into the body of the city.
