The title of the exhibit is “Acetone,” and the paintings are inspired by childhood memories of eating too much cream, a habit that can cause “acetone disease,” otherwise known as diabetes. The very title implies inevitable retribution for gluttony and leads one to contemplate the idea that contemporary art is anything but a simple pastime. We also have to pay for abuses of this “antidepressant,” which distracts us from our tedious reality.
By playing with scope, Soloviova recreates an idler’s dream of the Arkadia confectionery shop with rivers of kysil and honey. We seem to turn into Lilliputians lost in a shop window loaded with sweets. The artist’s powerful desire to raise one’s cholesterol level is evident from the fact that the cookies look like fat, three-meter-long caterpillars. Hidden in the selection of attributes of the sweet life is the artist’s extreme solicitousness. We obtain the same “tasty and charming” spectacle that we were expecting.
However, the artist sticks to her own view; what is portrayed is less important than how it is portrayed. The strict realism of her painting style adds a very significant appearance to the cookies. The viewer has an opportunity to fully realize his small size compared to the cream monsters. We are not the ones eating these terrifying yet alluring objects of desire; they are devouring us.
These nonstandard relations become the subject of studies on the deforming scale of the consumer values of pop art, a line that is continued by Soloviova. It would be very simple to assume that pop artists are naively engaged in commodity fetishism. But art always takes a closer look at the reverse side of things.
For example, social psychology examines the so-called shopping syndrome. For people traumatized by reality, boutiques and confectionery shops become oases, where they can feel quiet and secure. But this “escape route” is closed to artists because they are always confined to their inner reality. A “paranoid” creative consciousness will detect a concealed threat even in a paradise of pastry. For an artist all these gingerbread houses are traps set by a witch to lure stupid children, reports Viktoria BURLAKA.
