I am not a mirror
Artists | |
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Year | 2024 |
Material | Oil on canvas |
Size | 180 × 180 cm |
<…> The paintings of the Electrosleep series are distinguished by their extreme brightness of color. These are the colors of electric sleep, in this case justifying their name "electric". They have no relation to reality, they are excessively bright and artificial. According to the artist, when you work with such colors all day long, the real world seems black and white for a while. At first glance, Electrosleep may seem like a "gamified" version of painting, leveling out its texture and speaking the language of digital-era comics. However, instead of the idea of interactivity, the paintings carry a deliberate coldness and alienation. It is unclear where the worlds depicted on the canvas are and what is left beyond them, where the author/viewer is and who he/she is. Their imaginary cheerfulness cannot deceive anyone. There is a feeling of disorientation, misunderstanding, loss, characteristic of the transformation experienced during the transition from the real world to many virtual ones. The artist calls her project anesthesia, hypnosis, failure, deception, trauma, fear, collapse, mutation, absence, cutting out... On the eve of the birth of "Electrosnea", a friend called her and told her about her dream, in which Tanya says: "I am not a candle, I am not a hydrangea, I am not like a beetle...". This is how the titles of her paintings "I am not a hydrangea", "I am not a mirror", "I am not a machine" appeared... and watercolors "I am not black", "I am not purple", "I am not a cobblestone", "I am not a book" appeared...
Affirmation through denial, the dreamlike nature of images, the flickering of meanings, interest in the unconscious, drives, automatic writing, allusions - all this points to the distant homeland of "Electrosnea" - the aesthetics of surrealism, born a little more than a century ago. However, unlike surrealist painting, which reflected on the change in traditional painting, the artist looks at screens. The connection between sleep and reality initially occurs in virtual space. Each screen is like a separate organ removed, a black hole that sucks us in. It is an entrance to the “non-world,” an apparatus of extraction. Man is a shell that the apparatus sucks out. On almost every canvas in “Electro-Sleep,” the artist has placed a funnel – a kind of portal symbolizing the state of transition to the world of “I am not,” to the kingdom of crooked mirrors, in which time and space are extracted.
After interference, failures, and extractions of pictorial electro-hallucinations, Akhmetgalieva immerses the viewer in the ephemeral space of graphics. Despite the fact that her watercolors contain images familiar from paintings, they are not sketches for them. On a white sheet of paper, in the stains of watercolor and bright flashes of acrylic, other spaces and new refractions arise. After a total blackout, traces of memories of “Time Withdrawal” remain — this is the name of the work, reminiscent of the bygone materiality of a bygone era, when a mechanical alarm clock still measured out the time of our analog sleep. In “Langolier” — the darkest watercolor of this series, dedicated to the heroes of Stephen King’s novel of the same name, mercilessly devouring the past, only the “cheerful” grin of the present remains — the black screen of “Electronic Sleep” sucking us in.
Text: Olesya Turkina