Viktor Alimpiev. Thrown banners look like an arable land 1, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 175 x 150
Everybody in Moscow loves Viktor Alimpiev. But no one really understands his work. Its meaning is hidden so carefully that you start to think that it might not be there at all. So I just can’t help being skeptical when everyone professes their love. I mean, come on. It’s Yuppie art. I like neo minimalist painting and Hollywood quality video and everything, but why does it all have to be pink, so poetic, so pathetic, so unreal, and so empty?
Alimpiev’s current solo exhibition at Ekaterina Foundation provides an answer of sorts. Curated by Theresa Mavica and Alexandra Kharitonova in collaboration with the artist, the show looks back over nearly ten very productive years. It creates a formalized space ideal for contemplation and aesthetic enjoyment, and not just of chocolate dipped strawberries and champagne at the opening. The parcour is stringent, reminiscent of a formal garden. The works are perfectly spaced, allowing you to concentrate on each piece in detail, to search for repetitions and differences, to swim through this world of rustling silk. Teresa Mavica is really good at helping artists to present the enigmatic and the obscure in a form that is legible but not comprehensible, as in her installation of a work by Andrei Monastyrski at the Arsenale in Venice, and here, she does it again. Corridors and rooms with paintings – shown in series that blur in memory, all somehow different though of course the same pale pink pleats, plaits, and curtains closing – lead from video room to video room, each properly darkened and soundproofed.
Exhibition view (c) Pyotr Zhukov // Openspace.ru
The quality of the video is high, and the lighting on the paintings too spectacular, as if to prove a point, to make the central message of the show known even to the illiterate: the whole phenomenon Alimpiev is not just about strange, almost-glossy movies, made in a slowed-down aesthetic of the high brow video clip; it’s also about brushwork and painterly plasticity. This plasticity, it goes without saying, is a luxury commodity that you can acquire.
Then again, this is not Regina, Alimpiev’s gallery, but a private foundation, and the one with perhaps the most high brow program (Yankilevsky, Valie Export, the Red Army, Gursky, and now Alimpiev) in town. Supposedly, here, commodity value is not art’s only meaning. And really, some singular emotion breaks in through all this intimate-erotic formalism, all these skin tones and fuzzy edges smelling of vanilla and baby powder and just a little morning breath. Intuitive half-automatic poetry formalized and edited in a virtuosic hypertechnological process, ultra-rational messages whispered in the act of love or on the edge of waking. Soft morning sounds, and enigmatic mating rituals, performed in a subtle musical sequence of dream-signs that only its author can decode.
Exhibition view (c) Pyotr Zhukov // Openspace.ru
Who’s that exhaling? What does it mean? There’s no way of knowing. So you watch and you watch and you wait until it’s over, determined to stick it out till the end, to listen to all those raspy whispers that interrupt the almost-silent, post-discursive world of potential commodities. Maybe this is the way you should look at art in general, you think. Sharp, keen, and balanced, fascinated and dispassionate, free of all those bothersome contexts. Never mind how much it all costs. In search of rhymes, loops, acts, and micro-events, but not in search of meaning. As Yuri Al’bert commented, Alimpiev is a “real artist,” somebody far more concerned with plasticity, spatial solutions, cropped angles, lighting, makeup and cuts that with any meaning, other than perhaps the most universal meaning of all. His work is about the fuzzy ritualized interface between people, mediated by the spectacle. Who knows what all these interactions mean. Meaning will come later when all the feelings have gone.
The edge of field 2, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 150
And there are plenty of feelings, most of them mixed. For one, the sense that those who insist on feeling alone trample humanity underfoot, as old Hegel once put it. And that there is plenty of disgust and manipulative cruelty in all these images, and not just an endless extenuation of desire and joy. His aesthetic is a strange mix, glamorous biopolitics by the elite for the elite, and intelligentsia melancholy, arranged around an image cult of purely personal aesthetic pursuits. It’s both autonomous art and a slowed-down high culture remake of all the gloss propagated to the nascent Russian middle class in lifestyle mags and on primetime tv. Alimpiev reveals that high-brow glamour has no meaning exterior to the metaphysical subtleties of its form, that it is nothing but a pure pink glory that one cannot quite remember once it’s gone. This is why he may just well one of the most – if not the most – symptomatic artists of what I call the New Russian Biedermeier and its cult of the interior, his art a figure of potentiality perfectly suited for the living rooms and offices of the Russian bourgeoisie.
The Russian version of this text is online at http://www.openspace.ru/art/events/details/1224/
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