The Yellow Babylon High-Rise

Motolian is faithful to soap. Having once chosen it as the theme and subject of his artistic interest, he succeeded in this way, creating his own, individual mythology. Soap in it is a cross–cutting metaphor, a nuclear mythologeme, and, at the same time, the material with which the artist works. Just as for Joseph Beuys, fat and wax acted as an independent, powerful textural principle, as well as a substitute, embodying the ideas and meanings of "social plastic", an ordinary piece of soap becomes a guide to the world of the most relevant meanings, which manifest themselves in it as an indicator launched into the right environment. This may be a cautious tactic, but it has an element of irony (self-irony) and the necessary critical distance.

Nevertheless, soap itself is a rather loaded object with different meanings, which, as a rule, have a reduced connotation. For example, the property of soap to slip out of your hands sets a certain direction of judgment without a clear, fixed line – it is a performative material that tends to escape and disappear along with water, expressing the fluidity and variability of states. The phenomenology of soap is such that it allows the artist to adjust his attitude by setting the necessary discourses of judgments.

Text: Gleb Ershov