Milena ORLOVA

PINOCCHIO'S MATURITY


In 1994, when analyzing "Life on the Snow", a big project made by Elena Elagina and Igor Makarevich at the State Russian Museum, Mikhail Ryklin assumed their work as an attempt to stand against the "dominating tendency of art brutalization". Since then distinctive opposition of "Conceptualist canon (petrified) vs. body (brutal) practices" has blurred. XL Gallery, once given a serious support to "physicalists", recently closed the theme, having declared disavowal from the "pubis-shavers, tongue-puncturers and other guts-die-harders". So what? Right after this the gallery is showing an exhibition by Igor Makarevich, as much "brutal", if not stronger than all the previous exercise of the kind, due to its refined age acuteness. Makarevich's show testifies the dismissal of the aforementioned opposition gone in two ways. An explicit body gesticulation becomes more metaphoric thus turning into a pseudonym for some abstract terms (when you see an erected penis in a photo, forget about body, actually it's about Russia's fate); on the other hand, "symbols and emblems" of Conceptual canon are getting hot blood and flesh.

The current exhibition is linked to the previous project through the wandering phantasm of Pinocchio, that grew up from a genderless log into a clinical Gumbert-like "anonym", his confession supplied. This perfect psychoanalytic story makes an antimony with the photographic series, where text stands for "daylight", enlightened and sentimental consciousness while photography goes as a dark sublimation or a "night-time" unconscious. The "childish" Pinoccio-styled poetic description of sexual experience not only makes it difficult to define the "patient's" age, but also shows up in a "tortured" surface of the photographs through explicit traces of orgasms reached by hard work. The brave paper foolscap made by papa Carlo looks more like a dreary nightcap with age. The same happens to a dummy-face that becomes older and closer to its prototype, the beak of a plague overall. Masquerade results in a merry reunion with a true object of desire, a sturdy and comfortable pinewood box.