The parallel program of the XIV Venice Architecture Biennale included an exposition that seems to have nothing to do with the art of architecture. This refers to the exhibition "On the other side of the red door" by the leading figure of the unofficial art of the USSR Mikhail Roginsky. His works of 1978-2001, the period of the Parisian emigration, were brought by the Mikhail Roginsky Foundation and in artibus, led by the patron Inna Bazhenova. The exposition was prepared in collaboration with the master's widow Liana Shelia-Roginskaya.
Why is a painter at the Architecture Biennale? It is not that simple. The exhibition curator Elena Rudenko explained that Roginsky's strategy of breaking up the world into pre-elements (door, table, shelf, chair, bathtub, bottle) is quite consistent with the idea of Fundamentals, which was formulated by the curator of the Biennale Rem Koolhaas and determined the direction the main exhibition of the festival.
As we remember, the main exhibition in the central pavilion of Giardini is called Elements of Architecture. She presents a certain catalog of modules from which the building is assembled: ceiling, window, floor, balcony, bathroom, door, etc. The exhibition is remarkable as an example of architectural propaedeutics, a three-dimensional textbook for teaching the alphabet of architectural forms. Encyclopedic articles, which accompany the demonstration of samples of roofs and toilets, could become the basis for the abstracts of some inquisitive young men and women from architectural colleges and universities. The problem is that in communicating with this encyclopedia of elements, there is no personal emotion and the author's speech of the artist-creator. Roginsky's exposition solves this problem. He's also about protoforms of our being and life. However, each of them is captured in a portrait and is charged with the energy of life gained by the artist himself.
Those entering the Ka'Foskari University, where Roginsky's exhibition is located, are greeted by his legendary red "Door". This is a 1965 object. Not found, as one might think at first, but created on purpose and having absolutely "portrait", like Malevich's "Black Square", plasticity and even facial expressions. The work with the surface is magnificent, which is prepared by the artist so skillfully (with careful attention to all burrs, paint drips and craquelures) that the rough product acquires the quality of a unique jewel, something like an encrypted self-portrait of the author.
So, already on the doorstep, the visitor of the exhibition acquires a dimension of humanity in communication with the international modernism of block houses and standard apartments, indifferent to this problem. Further movement supports and develops this theme of “measuring humanity”. It's great that the architecture of the exhibition was done by the guru of Russian modernism, Evgeny Ass. He placed the work on two floors. The very layout of the main suite of Ca'Foscari University is simple: a large corridor overlooking the Grand Canal. Parallel to it there is a chain of small medieval rooms with wooden ceilings and sometimes fireplaces. Ass deliberately made the experience of space difficult. He cut all the suites with wooden false walls. Each room built in antiquity was painted in the color of Roginsky's painting (soft tones of pink, green, dark blue, milky white, ocher). It turned out to be something like a labyrinth. The viewer wanders through the nooks and crannies of the consciousness of a resident of Soviet khrushchev and communal apartments. The conversation is conducted by things inhabiting the rooms of such apartments.
One question to Evgeny Assu
Archi.ru:
- Evgeny Viktorovich, what effect did you want to achieve in the exposition project?
Evgeny Ass:
- Effect is not the right word - I tried to achieve a certain congeniality of the exhibition space of Roginsky's painting. And I would not speak about the labyrinth, but about the difficult trajectory of movement within the picturesque space. The broken shapes of the halls, dramatic spatial transitions (all the openings are made different), irregular hanging of works - for me all this is the "architecture of painting" by Roginsky.
There are a lot of things in the rooms and they are collected in sections. The first one is "ABC of two-dimensionality". Works of 1978-1980. Shelves with bottles and dishes. Deliberately brutally painted with cheap acrylic on cheap paper or cardboard. Endowed with some kind of animal, primitive strength. Wild painting is akin to Fauvism: the apparent negligence of the origin of the most aristocratic. The precision and depth of color and the beauty of tonal relationships act like a sunlit stained glass window.
In the section “Interior. Scenery. Figure in Space”shows works from 1981-1982. This is a visual reconstruction by Roginsky of those apartments that were known from the Soviet years. The artist already lived in Paris and painted rooms with a lampshade, bathrooms and stairs from memory. He did not want to please anyone. His credo was to free art from beauty and artificiality, to erase the distance between painting and life as much as possible. After all, they have one living affinity. Therefore, its interiors are deliberately poor and fragile. With smoky baths, dusty radiators, rough tables and lopsided stepladders. Two-meter paintings are made on paper with acrylics in an almost monochrome technique: gray tinted with pink. Nevertheless, getting into these interiors with our eyes, we do not feel inferiority and discomfort. Subtle work with space and delicate nuances of the surface within the same tone make the painting exquisite and very noble. Not otherwise, in these communal interiors of Soviet modernism, scraps of intellectual disputes about Bakhtin and Shklovsky (they were conducted precisely in the space of common kitchens) hover in these communal interiors of Soviet modernism.
One work at the exhibition accurately refers to a possible sympathizer of Roginsky in the sense of creating a deliberately ugly and rude, but at the same time refined and finely subtle embodiment of art. This work is "Hairdresser". In the haze of morning dawn, a Soviet hairdresser deftly scissors the hair of a client sitting in front of a mirror. Well, of course, Roginsky's counterpart in this case is Mikhail Fedorovich Larionov with his barbers, the clumsy pantomime of the life of provincial cities, deliberately artless painting and, with all that, a stunning culture of color and space. Roginsky and Larionov are united by the understanding of the ordinary and banal urban environment as a unique source of artistic ideas and images.
Today, both in Russia and in the world, there has been a process of rehabilitation of that impersonal blocky architecture of the 1960s – 1980s, which for the time being in the intelligentsia was indecent to love, and to hate it was Bonton. Today, the younger generation is precisely in the second wave of post-war modernism looking for examples of an anti-bourgeois style responsive to social problems. Many pavilions of the current Biennale are dedicated to the modernist buildings of the countries of the sixties - eighties.
How do you inspire the viewer to get in touch with this indifferent architecture? How to animate her? Roginsky helps to find the answer. The last section of the exhibition is called "The Returned Painting" (1991-2001). It shows paintings (canvas, oil) with views of the corners of Moscow, which the artist living in Paris wrote from memory. Pink houses with rows of identical windows, blue barracks, gray streets and entrances would look depressing and joyless if it were not for the energy of love and compassion emanating from each canvas. To the world that the artist left long ago, but which remained with him for life.
The exhibition is open until September 28.
