"Brunette" from the "Coasters" series.
Artists | |
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Year | 2022 |
Material | Plasticrete, wool, oil, ceramics |
Size | 78 × 44 × 30 cm |
In his new project, Motolyanets brings together his almost ten years of experience working with soap, using various media in which he has proven himself over the years: painting, photography, sculpture, object, performance.
It is important that the first works in this cycle - canvases depicting piles of soap - became for the artist a response to the events of two years ago in Belarus, where mass protests took place. The political source of the creation of the works is not revealed in them. On the contrary, the towers of multi-colored bars, painted in the style of "Richter's photorealism" represent the triumph of the world of prosperity and consumerism, glamour and hedonism, and the hypertrophy of the scale is reminiscent of the strategy of success in the presentation of promotional images in pop art.
The artist turns the aesthetics of “capitalist realism” against itself, working on its territory – and now the silent presence of elongated figures (lying and standing) refers to archaic forms of rituals, traces of which remained in primitive structures – dolmens. Rituals of purification? The bare stones, worn down by time, wind and water, are synonymous with soap remnants: the natural, the elemental rhymes with the human, the social. There is something childish, infantile in the construction of soap dolmens – a return to archetypal structures that affirm the presence of man in the world.
Text: Gleb Ershov