At first glance, this is an exhibition of paintings, and it’s hard to believe that it’s about anything other than colourful pleasures. Shvetsov did literally everything to ensure that his paintings conveyed romantic exuberance, pasty sybaritism, and painterly majesty. The thick, black, colourful layer on the backgrounds captures broad, “from the hip” strokes of the palette knife. Languid charms are drowned in glazes or curved into layered textures. The young ladies are depicted in furs, masks, shoes, stockings, and are given elaborate names, similar to those found on websites offering commercial sex. Rubensian hot shadows, Rembrandtian gold in halftones, Kiefer‑like lumps and clumps, the sweeping Richterian flitz. Shvetsov filled his works with killer attractors, triggers that unleash an unreflective delight. Or the same unreflexive anger: "once again, the painting celebrates gender inequality, once again the dehumanization of women is aestheticized, 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’s happening on the canvas is sheer hooliganism: a game of objectification, a glorification of fetishism that turns into grotesque, a balancing act on the border between classicism, porn, and contemporary art. To pass off narcissistic buffoonery, complete with a costume change from a cisgender oppressor to his victim in high heels and feathers, as “high art” is a typical strategy for Pyotr Shvetsov. The picturesque temptations here are needed, firstly, to lure the unlucky aesthete into this secret shapito. Secondly, as props for the performances. Thirdly, as documentation and evidence. Thus, the genre of this exhibition is an archival exhibition about a series of performances.
Text: Alexander Dashevsky.
