An exhibit of famous Ukrainian artist Roman Minin will take place in Kharkiv from September 22 till October 10. Incidentally, this artist’s works will also be displayed at the annual forum of art projects ART-KYIV Contemporary at Mystetsky Arsenal.
Stephane Mallarme said, “Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.” Today the world, if it is not ended as a book – there are many of them – at least is continued with a wonderful exhibit. It’s almost explosive. It’s experimental and radical. This is Roman Minin’s project “Transformatka.” Minin is a well-known Kharkiv-based artist who has become famous as the leader of “new leftists” in Ukrainian youth art and got an informal name of “Miners’ Rivera,” which he fully justifies.
The socially acute project, which strangely resembles the shaman practice of glossolalia (speaking in tongues), took place at Kharkiv-based Yermilov Centre in August and September. The main object of the exhibit is the Award for Silence (2013), a complicated in terms of content and shape image, created as a decorative panel and executed as tondi, with every plane (or part of the plane, because the integrity of the panel is fragmentized into mosaic scene-pieces with well-known “miner” iconography) gets a symbolical meaning, turned to the context of the present-day reality.
Today this work looks like a four-meter-high light box/bas-relief, which all the time changes the areas and type of lightning and translates the shimmering cosmogonist and eschatological symbols, metaphorically mold in a shape of “the black obelisk, a monument to the world we can say goodbye forever.” Apart from that, there are many huge polymeric and polymorph painted transformers, obviously anthroposophic, and a mix of former “mininesks,” connected with active use of painting, photo, various auteur graphic techniques and forms of sculpture-painting.
Kinetic movement, the dynamic of perception, and actual perception develop around them.
In spite of the modern shape, all objects are purposefully held by the author within traditional painting, graphic, and sculptural plastic, which needs generalization, certain schematization, laconism of the artistic language, and plunging into the depth of internal culture content. All this is present here. Let alone the fact that all the exhibited art objects are of a monumental character.
The exhibit emphasizes the need to radically transform one’s mind and culture and social values, around which the human world spins. Roman Minin emphasizes that everyone of us badly needs transformation, transformation-deformation of the forms of being and art, which will substitute the black abyss of everyday routine by the world of new constellation, in which the spark of life (“Don’t mourn that I died, don’t miss me, baby. We are all a part of a big explosion, our life is a spark.”) will transform in a far going echo of the spirit of a bird who flies up high.
Making an emphasis on the content and the fact of current social phenomena and modern social processes, the author of the exhibition act does not break the connection with life and artistic reality; he wants to break their limits, using the entire conglomerate of available artistic forms. This is topped by the self-analysis and constant trial of the assertive power of his artistic language.
With Roman Minin’s vernissage, Yermilov Centre opens the summer residences for Ukrainian and foreign artists, whose project will launch the new exhibition season.
Namely in the process of everyday transformation of material and intellectual reality, which the person lives through “here and now,” we get an efficient, personally artistic, script (screenplay) of being, behind which the new picture of the world order unfolds: according to Minin, “the processes of our transformations acquire tangible silhouettes and images, we get to know ourselves better, before forgetting one another again.”
The artist’s attention focuses on general human flaws of consumers’ society, red-tape society and community turned to the simulacra of existence and reproductions of its artistic metaphors.
Interestingly, stepping back from the assertion of the miners’ topic, Minin develops the image of a miner as a social concept and the component of his own artistic discourse towards more meaningful symbolism of world order and human everyday universals, trying to set certain patterns between them.
Minin’s radicalism is based on the understanding that the world doesn’t exist unless there is a logical, linguistic, and visual scheme of means of its perception, because Minin’s schemes of visualization of the world are protean, movable, they don’t stay within the limits of the concept of “clear eye”: we understand that what we see is no more true than we see only what we know, according to Nelson Goodman.
Minin is trying to change the established forms of knowledge and its visual representation, making the audience plunge into the changeable world of the chimeras after acceptation of which only warm, comfortable, and soothing Cheshire Cat smile remains. However, at home it will burst with a grimace of pain and despair.
The dynamics of movable objects seems to merge with their static placement in space: the rounded shapes, like the light box, we can see next to the sharp shapes of transformers; black-and-white aesthetics of the graphic works in a shimmering way appear through the colored decoration of sculpture forms, and the traditional technique of graphic and painting receives an aura of the advertisement media.
Robotic forms, like the art forms, envelop the inner space of the audience who immediately transform into the resident of the Land of Oz with their giants and their antipodes.
Minin’s exhibit is a platform, where the way to transformation and self-merging of a modern man with the hope to avoid cerebral and intellectual mortification starts and ends. But does the author leave such a hope for us? The process of his creative work remains open.
