A Gift

In the first couple of entertainments — simulated fights, gymnastic bridges on the railway track and technologically sophisticated devices for suicide between trees — were filmed on 16 mm film. This is how the art of Yufit was born.  In 1983, the activities of Yufit and his associates acquired a name — Necrorealism. Of course, necrorealism can be considered a continuation of the medieval tradition of Ars Moriendi, the art of dying, but Yufit does not depict death dances characteristic of this tradition, he does not paint anatomical theaters, does not remove corpses, does not visit morgues, does not live in a cemetery. Since the late 1980s, Yufit has been taking two cameras with him to the forest: 16 mm and 35 mm. The first one is specifically for photography. In parallel with the work of the operator, Yufit shoots himself on a sixteen-millimeter camera. Out of a thousand frames, he chooses one, enlarges it, fragments it, often flips it over, changing the horizontal position to vertical, top to bottom. The artist strives to manifest the invisible in the play of light and shadow, in the strange "suspended" position of the characters. He is an eyewitness. He is a "Cold witness." That's the name of one of his photographs. An eyewitness, because the movie-photo-eye creates a fact of reality. Cold, because photography is always in the past. Being born on the border of life and death, black and white, Yufit's photographs demonstrate the process of image deformation. The artist achieves this effect through repeated counter—typing - the translation of the image from negative to positive. In the mid-1990s, Yufit created a series of landscapes. In these monochrome photographs, he forms a necroimage of landscapes appearing on the border of pathos and pathology, as if seen from a bird's-eye view, and characters taken beyond the ordinary by autism and ecstatic anticipation of death. Yufit's heroes are neither alive nor dead. They are excluded from the social order, forced to wander on the outskirts of big cities. They can't die because they can't live. They roam on the remains of a worldwide ideology, a new order that enslaves man no less than totalitarian regimes.  

Olesya Turkina and Victor Mazin