At first glance, this is an exhibition of paintings, and it's hard to believe that it's about anything other than coloristic pleasures. Shvetsov did literally everything to make his paintings convey romantic exuberance, pasty sybaritism and picturesque maestro. A bold black colorful layer on the backgrounds captured wide swings of the spatula "from the hip". Languid charms drowned in lessirovki or arched with layered textures. The young ladies are depicted in skins, masks, shoes, stockings, and provided with fancy names, as on websites offering commercial sex. Hot Rubens shadows, Rembrandt gold in semitones, Kiefer's lumps and clumps, Richter's sweeping Fleitz. Shvetsov filled his works with killer attractors, triggers that trigger unreflexive delight. Or the same unreflexive anger: "again, the painting celebrates gender inequality, again aestheticizes the dehumanization of women, and this is all now, when violence of all kinds has been legitimized"!
The stronger the emotional response, the louder the off-screen giggle of the author. The pictorial techniques and plots that Shvetsov so cleverly piles up are needed to turn the painting into a mocking farce. What is happening on the canvas is sheer hooliganism: playing at objectification, glorifying fetishism, turning into the grotesque, balancing on the edge of classics, porn and contemporary. To slip a narcissistic buffoonery disguised as a cisgender oppressor into his victim in stilettos and feathers under the guise of "high art" is a typical strategy for Peter Shvetsov. Picturesque temptations are needed here, firstly, in order to lure the hapless aesthete into this secret tent. Secondly, as props for performances. Thirdly, as documentation and evidence. Thus, the genre of this exhibition is an archival exhibition about a series of performances.
Text: Alexander Dashevsky
