Artist Andrei Mitenev presented an exhibition-poem about the journey of his 3D double

Andrey Mitenev’s exhibition “After Portrait / As Alive” has opened at the Zverev Center for Contemporary Art, the main character of which is the author’s 3D double. Each work about “little Andrei” is a visual verse. And together the “stanzas” add up to a poem about a plastic dreamer, over whom a big and heavy world hangs, and who, from this onslaught, froze in anticipation of a miracle.

A piercing and moderately surreal poem evokes associations with the image of a “little man” – in the best traditions of Russian literature. However, the plot has another literary basis – the series was originally called “Waiting for Godot”, because the story of “little Andrei” is consonant with the situation of the heroes of Samuel Beckett’s play.

“This story began in 2015,” Andrey Mitenev says, “when I was passing by a 3D studio and saw an advertisement: we will make a small copy of you. I went in, wrapped myself in a piece of cloth that I had with me, they scanned me. After 10 days, I received a three-dimensional “photo” made of plastic.

A reduced copy of the artist resembles the little Prince Saint-Exupery: we have the same touching romantic loner. The plastic man, knees drawn up to his chest and wrapped in fabric, looks somewhere into the sky, as if waiting for a miracle.

Having received a 3D double, the artist and his wife, photographer Marina Ragozina, went for a walk with “little Andrei” and began to shoot him in different places. First on the steps of the escalator, where he looked at someone’s giant shoes, then in the subway car, where curious “gullivers” studied him intently. Then a reduced copy of the artist is on the railing of the bridge, which overlooks the railway tracks. “It was only later that we noticed in the photo that a man in the same position is sitting on the roof of the garage in the distance and looking at the sky,” Andrey comments on this picture. And there are many such accidents, when real life becomes part of a metaphorical narrative, in this poem.

Marina Ragozina also filmed a 3D double at home in her workshop – in front of a cake in the form of Lenin’s blue head, face to face with Andrei himself (this photo became a poster for the exhibition), next to a toy pink castle and a pony. But here, too, the 3D double, with its frozen lonely dream in its gaze and pose, turned out to be the antithesis of the proposed background.

– Initially, I called this series “Waiting for Godot,” Marina Ragozina explains. – It seemed to me that the situation in which the little plastic man found himself was consonant with the situation of Beckett’s heroes.

Surrounded by giants, frozen in one position, even forced to ride the subway escalator under the number, in a world disproportionate to him, he is waiting for a certain Godot who will revive him and bring meaning to his plastic life. At the same time, it cannot be said that the plastic hero is somehow particularly unhappy, it seems that he is about equally good everywhere, besides, sometimes someone throws sweets and provides him with a change of scenery. But in general, he is equally plastic, and he only endlessly raises his head upwards, to where Godot should come from.

A series of photographs of Marina occupies the walls of the Zverev Center. Not far from each of them, an art object by Andrey Mitenev, created based on a specific photograph, hovers. These works have been done recently – in the last couple of years. The art objects suspended from the ceiling are made using the collage technique invented by the Dadaists at the beginning of the 20th century: then the artists responded to the cruelty and cynicism of the world, which was turned over by the First World War, with irrational art. And collage, as a method of random selection of elements, was used as a form that, as the art historian Klaus Schumann put it, “releases forces” and “reduces everything to absurdity.”

Surrealism later grew out of the Dada movement (1916-1923), and postmodernism began with it. Andrey Mitenev’s works made of welded metal, with plywood and plaster inserts, pieces of black-and-white historical photos pasted in, are also irrational. The already symbolic photo journey of “little Andrei” turns into a surreal thriller.

Each collage object is two-sided; on the reverse side of the three-dimensional “picture” you can find another plot and image. And in each there is an element of chance inserted into the “canvas” of real life. Here is the hero-dreamer sitting on the platform and looking at the approaching train number 666. “I only noticed the number later when I pasted a photo that I accidentally found on the net onto the object. My method is intuitive. I try not to think when I’m doing the work, everything goes by itself,” the artist admits. And here is a sculpture with “little Andrei”, on which a train falls from above. Another work depicts a double in close-up – rails pass through its head. The rapid movement of life, which symbolizes the train, becomes the antagonist hero in this visual poem.

Something hangs over the little man all the time (either a block, or a train, or a society in the form of Gulliver people), but he continues to dream and look into the sky. The most eloquent central installation of the exhibition, where a plastic man takes on human size. Behind him are two huge observer eyes, and a heavy metal cube hangs over his head, and it seems that the load is about to fall and crash right into his forehead at the sharpest angle. But no threat, no gaze from “big brother” can change his plastic hope.

Perhaps before us is an insignificant person, living in his own small closed world, waiting for the mythical Godot, who will never come. But this illusory dream preserves him from the inside.