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Igor Mezheritsky. «Flowers and Isects»
28.04.2005 – 29.05.2005
In 1994, Igor Mezheritsky, together with Dmitry Alekseev, a sculptor, established an association entitled The Centre of Hard Art. They referred to their art as neo-brutalism, by analogy with Art Brute of Jean Dubuffet.
Dubuffet is Igor Mezheritsky's favorite. There are others, and the least beloved one is Warhal. These two, who seem to be determining the range of his preferences, may throw light on his works. Mezheritsky's canvasses are the Dubuffet after the Warhal. Or after the television. Hence its major differences. Revealed in texture, earthly colors, the chaos of lines and rough texture of Dubuffet's canvasses that appeal to the earth, the land. The image emerges from out the picturesque «land» and cannot be separated from either its background or the corporeity of the medium where it is deeply rooted. Dubuffet pictures, as they are, refuse the technologies of reproduction. On the contrary, Mezhernitsky's pictures offer presentment, which is a kind of pattern transferrable to another canvass, or, for that matter, to any medium at all. Gaps between precise black contours are filled with local colors devoid of any nuances, seguing from a half-tone to another one, in a poster animated style. The subjects are extremely clear and catchy: the everyday «gutter», parodies of cigarette ads, caricature variations of classic iconography. Superimposed captions add up to the image and liken canvasses to the cinema or cartoons.
Dubuffet, as is well known, resorted to the primitive art, to the works of mentally disturbed persons, also to graffiti, which are on the borderline between the pictorial art and landscape. Igor Mezherinsky's sources are, in their own way, similarly anonymous and elemental. They are the archetypes of mass consciousness, now inseparable from mass media's clichйs: images transmitted through the mass media, living their own lives in the masses, distorted in the process of communication, degrading into semi-folk, anecdotal phantoms.
One of the latest Mezheritsky's projects, the graphic Pushkiniana, is a series of drawings prompted by his brother and a friend of his, the people who have nothing to do with either painting or art as such. The drawings accompanied by verbal commentaries are variations of the theme of «what might have happened to Pushkin if he lived in our times». We see a gigolo of Pushkin, a killer of Pushkin, the Pushkin in a loony house and in similar foul places, states and plights; to cut it short, we see Pushkin degraded to the social bottom. The pathos of Sun-of-the-Russian-poetry mythology is dwindled, though never reduced: the drawings are perceived as an allegory of the Russian poetry itself struggling through hell and high water. It may be a good logical conclusion of the project if these drawings were used as sketches for full-scale easel paintings virtually stemming from pictorial litter and garbage.
Mezheritsky's works are not so much nearing authentic folk and street graffiti, rather, they pertain to the phenomena of the TV culture that could be defined, with a certain degree of conventionality, as cynical: they are in a way a national easel analogue of the aesthetic of «Sipsons» and ……. The art used to aim to stop Time (Verweile doch, Du bist so schцn!), to snatch its trophy from Time, now it would be proper to say, to stop the macaroni or video tape, to have the «freeze frame», to transfer the picture to another medium, for example, to the easel painting.
In this case, painting is not autonomous, it performs a kind of applied function, the function of de-animation of animated cartoons. If these pictures are characterized by criticality, it is not because they dissect medium images in an analytical and aloof manner. On the contrary, Igor Mezherinsky is extremely close to his material: it is not accidental that he works in the organic techniques of painting, shunning reproduction technologies. His criticality is rooted in the element of total parody, of mockery, yet it elevates the reality to be appreciated and admired. Mezherinsky not only «lets down», he sublimates — such is the peculiarity of art, no matter what medium it might use. This is especially pronounced in his latest works. They are still as brutal in graphic and subjects as before, but their bright refined colours can no longer be called brutal or naпve.
Mezheritsky remains a marginal figure even at the Petersburg stage, yet, according to the Hamburg score, he is today one of the five or six most interesting painters in St Petersburg.
Andrei Fomenko
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