Icastica (2006)

Painting, objects

Icastica (2006)

Живопись, объекты

Exhibitions: Sergey Shutov. Icastica. Michela Rizzo gallery, Venice, 4.03.–23.04.2006.

Выставки: Sergey Shutov. Icastica. Галерея Michela Rizzo, Венеция, 4.03.–23.04.2006.

Sergey Shutov is an artist worldwide known and in particular in Venice. He represented Russia in the Biennale 2001, where he showed the now famous installation Abacus and he participated to the collective exhibition Orient Inn that took place at Palazzo Pesaro Papafava in 2004.

His first solo exhibition in Italy shows a selection of recent artworks and a site-specific project called Books project.

There is no disguise, in his artworks ornament is banished. The object is replaced “as it is”. The series of paintings Sky…Sky evoke unavoidable associations with the typical iconography of the Soviet era with its fetish-objects. Images of planes, missiles, helicopters pulse on backgrounds where the geometrical composition of lines recall propaganda manifestos.

The symbols displayed on the canvas are not only the ones of the Soviet Union; in another cycle of paintings, Russian Pop Art, Shutov portraits John Lennon, Andy Warhol following a method to be found in the pop figurative language: use of non-mixed colours, use of technical drawing and of advertising graphics.

The act shifts from the “creation” to the “editing”. In the installation A.K.M./Association of Karma Modificationshe inserts in the barrel of five Kalaschnikows hung on the wall religious and cultural symbols such as the cross or the Star of David: the targets to hit or to be hit.

The translation and the transformation of signs and symbols - removed from politics, society and customs - come to occupy the art territory, through different techniques – de-contextualitation, combination and re-signification – by co-opting the avant-gardes and the iconography of socialist realism. The most effective synthesis of the different impulses, which animate his art and which find their roots in the different artistic movements of the Twentieth Century, resides in Books Project, a site-specific project where the books replaced “as they are”, treated as sculpture-objects hung on the wall, approach and intersect, creating a composition where the ultra-economic figures of the Euclidean geometry acquire a physical dimension.

Sergey Shutov uses anonymous gestures to re-organize pre-existent materials. Floating in the immense universe of vocabulary, of the lexicon, he conceives new forms of alliances breaking away from expressiveness intended as a category. The gesture is never veiled but declared with force and contemporary icons are returned with icastic coldness.