Actually, the transition from thoughtful questioning, shaky uncertainty assumptions to the modus of reality, which suddenly begins to realize one of the potential scenarios of the film-catastrophe, would look like an accident. If… If the beautiful projects Maria Safronova, the background of which the Kandinsky Prize 2012 and Sergey Kuryokhin Award (2015), the motif of uncertainty and shimmering horror would not be one of the key.
More than 30 museums from around the world have organized an online exhibition of Frida Kahlo
early In her project “the daily Routine” (2013) it is with methodical detachment captured the time from dawn to dusk in a psychiatric hospital. Characters of the series “the Game of General view” (2015) have become exemplary students and kindergartners, as if descended from her balls, stars and rockets with the collective images in memory. These projects were built on the contrast between the genre and its modern content. No, no expressionist vzvihrennyh and bursts not found in “daily Routine”. And the “Game…” not to find traces of children’s games with their spontaneity, unpredictability, mischief and freedom. Children serious, tense and responsible as little adults. They are exemplary of how little the characters in the paintings of the early Renaissance or, as mentioned on the front pictures representing the life of the perfect student.
Ideal occupies an important place in the universe, which creates Safronov. Perfect rhymes with rational. For example, count the beauty of the “sweet art of perspective”. Dining room and procedural, corridors and hall of the clinic with the floor, like a chess Board, symmetrically arranged and emphasized the functional, like a view of the Florentine area or portico of the temple.mA. This cold rationality should like to balance the suffering and illness of people in this ideal world with the perfect treatment routine. But the Renaissance theme of man’s might, which implicitly preserves the memory of easel paintings, then fizzles. Instead of leisure – the fight in the hallway, Breakfast was puzzled watching as an electrician changing a light bulb on the ceiling. The plot, which then lined up the artist, obviously, is the opposite: it’s about how irrational people with his mad passions and aggression is included in the “geometry” of perfect world and an imperfect society.
Pictures of isolation: the Russians at home I repeat the images of famous paintings
in Fact, a long-standing project “Total private” (2017), shows the Moscow Museum of modern ART and gallery “Triumph” in the framework of the “Young lions”, and showed this meeting of traditional painting with the study of history familiar to us institutions in the version of, say, Michel Foucault.
Picture of an institution, be it a nursery, clinic, or office, as well were not neutral, and rigidly forming the human structures. The current project by Maria Safronova continues the idea of the exhibition “Shared private”. But instead of the kindergarten and the clinic here the space of the school. Instead of the irrationality of the disease – a threat or war, or man-made disaster. But the principle is the same – check the strength of the genre, showcasing a conditional framework, where the terrible and irrational needs to be tamed, as a shepherd in a gas mask in “Portrait of a young man with a dog”. The genre of the portrait, painted on Board with oil, as stated, but the hero in ceremonial garb appears a faceless character in a gas mask. The perfect and the exalted hero is invisible, unknown, hidden behind the protective garb.
the Genre of the series “O.B. J.” rests on the tradition of images of scenes with children playing. They enjoyed success among customers small Dutch and, later, lovers of the sentimental Pastorals with the cowherd and portraits romantic Gavroche. In the paintings of Maria Safronova clean Gavroche in front of the class disassemble and assemble AKM; in birch grove (Hello Kuindzhi!) speed wear hazmat suits… in short, learn to survive in an apocalyptic situation. The cozy genre “scenes with children” mixed with recognizable images of posters on civil defense. The bucolic calm of the user life-saving acquires the taste of the surreal grotesque.
Tretyakov gallery started a video installation work in the hall of Repin
Taming horrible – the favorite plot types with the excavation of ancient ruins. Not surprisingly, Safronova remembered him in his journey to the origins of a social utopia. But the popular motif of the curious ruins of the XVIII century, it enters a chamber in the interior of the classrooms, where fossils from the study of biology, or models of molecules and cells looking at forgotten photos of pioneers. After Chernobyl they look very realistic. About Dutch painting with maps of trade routes on the wall of the hallway and remember. Perfect space in a rational world, which eventually disappears is a question, of course, to man. The question about the correctness of the model world that is falling apart right before our eyes. The interior, meanwhile, becomes a still life, reminiscent of the humble mortal, Memento mori.