Three registers of Russian life were shown in rhymes: an exhibition-poem opened at ROSIZO

“Simple things”: between the past and the dream of the future

The exhibition “Simple Things. Rhymes and images.” More than 60 works – from painting and sculpture to designer glass and installations – tell about the inner world of the Russian person. Three halls – three registers – three parallels: past – present – ​​dream of the future. All of them simultaneously coexist in each of us, and here they are intertwined poetically – together with the poems of Blok, Yesenin, Pasternak, Okudzhav and Akhmadulina. The rhymes were considered by the art observer “MK”.

On the first floor of the exhibition space in Petroverigsky Lane, you feel that life is truly poetry, sometimes harsh, sometimes exhausting, but at the same time inspiring.

The first hall immerses you in the harsh pages of history. There is a lot here reminiscent of the Second World War and other difficult times, for example, the development of territories with a harsh climate. Graphics and paintings, mainly represented by courageous portraits, are accompanied by quotes from soldiers’ letters.

Manuscripts from the front take up an entire wall – the collage on the photo wallpaper made the letters look like flying cranes. Here, as in the immortal lines of Rasul Gamzatov: “Sometimes it seems to me that the soldiers, / who did not return from the bloody fields, / did not once die in this land, / but turned into white cranes.”

A rhyme to the graphics of Yuri Pimenov (portrait of a wartime soldier) and the painting of Vladimir Vorobyov (The Peasant, 1919) are the works of famous glass artists – Svetlana Ryazanova, Galina Antonova, Lyudmila Zolina, Dmitry and Lyudmila Shushkanov. Over time, the tragic past becomes glassy, ​​but it always lingers somewhere in the subcortex – this is the genetic code.

The second section is about peaceful life. The everyday life of the post-war period, so similar to today’s present, is told not only through poetry, but with the help of objects. Authentic skates from the 1940s echo the picturesque scene where a boy wearing earflaps seems to have just returned from the skating rink.

In front of an ironic landscape by Leonid Soyfertis, depicting a winter plein air and a couple of artists, Soviet tubes of paint are laid out, with a thermos standing nearby. A special place is occupied by a graphic drawing by Evgeny Kibrik: in front of us is a young man sleeping on a newspaper in a full train. Next to the sketch, probably made from life, is the Trud newspaper from 1967, on top of which the artist Shamil Mametov drew a fish. The idea of ​​this installation-rhyme belongs to the curator of the exhibition Andrey Raikin. Thus, an everyday scene takes on an additional subtext, which contains both a Christian code (self-sacrifice) and a Soviet one (the practice of wrapping fish in newspaper was common and was reflected in many works of art). In a word, everyday life brings both joy and sadness, there are meetings with friends and early rises to work, and bustle, and moments of relaxation.

The third chapter of the poem is a dream of beauty and freedom, a future that invariably seems bright. Perhaps this young man who fell asleep on the train is dreaming of exactly this: the endless sea, floating female images, sunny landscapes collected in the third section from aerial sculpture, ceramics, graphics and painting. The works of such authors as Viktor Tsigal and Yakov Romas rhyme with the lines of David Samoilov: “But still in stellar moments / We are seduced by a dream. / And the blood boils. And destinies are swollen, / Like a sail filled with the wind.”

“The exhibition shows three registers of Russian life that exist in parallel,” exhibition curator Andrei Raikin tells MK. – They make life full and multifaceted: sadness and memory addressed to the past, expressed through harsh images, everyday life, shown objectively, and the future – dreams of the beautiful and sublime. We have divided them into three chapters, but all these parallels fill us at the same time.