At first glance, this is an exhibition of paintings and it is hard to believe that this is about anything other than coloristic pleasures. Shvetsov did literally everything to ensure that his paintings conveyed romantic riot, pasty sybaritism and pictorial mastery. The thick black paint layer on the backgrounds captured wide “from the hip” strokes of the spatula. Languid charms drowned in glazes or arched with multi-layered textures. Young ladies are depicted in skins, masks, shoes, stockings, provided with pretentious names, like on websites offering commercial sex.
Hot Rubensian shadows, Rembrandtian gold in halftones, Kieferian lumps and clots, sweeping Richterian flutes. Shvetsov filled his works with murderous attractors, triggers that launch unreflexive delight. Or the same unreflexive anger: "again the picture glorifies gender inequality, again the dehumanization of women is aestheticized, and all this now, when violence of all kinds has become legitimized!" The stronger the emotional response, the louder the author's off-screen giggles. The pictorial techniques and plots that Shvetsov so cleverly piles up are needed to turn the picture into a mocking farce. What is happening on the canvas is sheer hooliganism: a game of objectification, a glorification of fetishism that turns into the grotesque, balancing on the edge of classics, porn and contemporary.
To slip in a narcissistic buffoonery with dressing up from a cisgender oppressor into his victim in high heels and feathers under the guise of "high art" is a typical strategy for Pyotr Shvetsov. Picturesque temptations are needed here, firstly, to lure the unlucky aesthete into this secret circus. 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.
