Magda and Lina are dolls. Or maybe Magda and Lina are girls who play with dolls. Or maybe one of them, for example Magda, is a doll, and the other, for example Lina, is her little mistress. Dmitry Gretsky, who draws dolls in close—up, does not give an answer to which of the two owners of female names is alive and which is plastic - and thus spins the whole intrigue of the exhibition.
For Dmitry Gretsky, the "turning point" was the theme of the living and the inanimate. In the 21st century, this topic turns out to be much more complicated than, for example, in the 19th century, than just the division into flesh and plastic. Gretsky paints large-format "portraits of dolls: peachy cheeks, wide-open glass eyes, invitingly opened chubby mouth. But if for an unspoiled viewer two centuries ago, all this rosy cheeks and plumpness would have been just an imitation of the childishness, purity and innocence of a porcelain doll, then today's connoisseurs recognize in the shimmer of inanimate flesh primarily a sexual offer, and a commercial offer. And the fact that the body offered for consumption is artificial does not matter at all: after all, the sex icons of our time — models, actresses, singers - are also photoshopped by glossy magazines to complete plasticity, and the pictures on the computer screen and products from the assortment of sex shops more than successfully compete with real women.. Beauty and desirability have ceased to be associated with life, and there is a clear boundary between the world of desire and the world of everyday life.
For Gretsky, the most important thing is that this boundary, which runs through the brains of living people, coincides with the boundary between the living and the artificial. He makes the series "Magda&Lena" about this border. Gretsky's "Magda" and "Lina" with their painted faces and long synthetic eyelashes are deliberately inanimate, no one will mistake them for people — and at the same time they look much more like advertising beauties than any, even the most well-groomed live audience in the gallery. They are similar not because they are particularly beautiful, but precisely because they are artificial. In this sense, the Waltsky dolls inherit the European myth of an artificial man, who precisely because of his artificiality becomes superhuman — but if the Golem and Frankenstein were designed to instill in our great-great-grandfather readers horror of the animated mechanism, then our contemporaries, this horror at the sight of the eyed and lipped Waltsky dolls must mix with admiration and desire.
Gretsky's paintings pose a question to the viewer about the essence of humanity. About what makes us human and how, even in an age of total dehumanization of public space, when both popularity and beauty not only do not presuppose humanity, but also oppose it. About the signs by which we still distinguish the living from the artificial. About how the doll doesn't look like a real person after all - although it may look better and more presentable than him. About what life is. It is from this point of view, detached from topical issues, that the Magda&Lena project becomes not only a protest against the ideology of consuming everything in the world and women in particular, but also a thoughtful study of how the living and the inanimate coexist in the consciousness of modern man. How together they change our attitude to the fundamentals of human existence. How, for example, eroticism transforms from the most vivid manifestation of life into the pursuit of an unattainable ideal — all the more unattainable because it is dead. How the image of a painted baby doll turns into a standard of beauty, and the image of a real adult woman ceases to be this standard. How, finally, we lose the ability to distinguish between the real and the unreal — or, on the contrary, the unreal and becomes our reality. And yet Gretsky's works work purely technologically like a time bomb, planted under modern mass aesthetics. Formally, they can be attributed to the genre of photorealism.: they resemble "redraws" from photographs. The artist carefully copies every glare, every reflection on the cheeks of his inanimate models. Nevertheless, the realism of Gretsky's painting technique is full of irony: the artist seems to be laughing at himself, knowing full well that no Michelangelo will make his nature more attractive than a simple designer on a salary, whose official duties include "glossy" portraits of models. Gretsky simultaneously copies the work of Photoshop workers and sneers at it. More importantly, it makes viewers think about the difference between a designer picture and a live life behind the scenes.
Text: Anna Matveeva