Evgeny Antufiev
dal 14/2/2014 al 7/3/2014
Segnalato da
14/2/2014
Evgeny Antufiev
Multimedia Art Museum MAMM, Moscow
"Twelve, wood, dolphin, knife, bowl, mask, crystal, bones and marble - fusion. Exploring materials" is a project created during a residential programme organised by the Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia (Italy). Russian artist sews, embroiders, carves, saws, crushes and assembles familiar materials, and his actions are subject to the logic of shamanic ritual and mystery rather than artistic creation.
MAMM in collaboration with the Collezione Maramotti presents ’Twelve, wood, dolphin, knife, bowl, mask, crystal, bones and marble — fusion. Exploring materials’, a project by Evgeny Antufiev created during a residential programme organised by the Collezione Maramotti and first exhibited in 2013 in Reggio Emilia (Italy).
Evgeny Antufiev is the only Russian artist of his generation to consistently demonstrate a unique sensitivity to archaism, a specific type of mythological consciousness, manifestations of which he finds in the modern world.
Antufiev returns to the physical world its long-lost sacral content, as if reinventing things, various objects, and the artist involves all the diversity of familiar materials and items in this micro-act of creation: clothing, crystals, minerals, insects, marble, animals, wood, beads, etc. Antufiev sews, embroiders, carves, saws, crushes and assembles these articles, and his actions are subject to the logic of shamanic ritual and mystery rather than artistic creation. At this moment true freedom is revealed to Antufiev, a space liberated from Euclidean logic, in which there arises a unity of the physical and symbolic substance of things.
In Antufiev’s hands any material shows the way to overcoming the concrete and unequivocal nature of form, and some degree of courage is required for the viewer to follow this new setup, the newly discovered rhythm. The viewer has to reject his habitual contemplation of art, now he must make literal, almost physical contact with numerous objects, situations and relations: the process of perceiving art is no longer delineated in terms of looking, examining; communication is increasingly complex, involving all the sense organs, obliging us to experience, to catch the rhythm and energies. He moves from dolphins to strange anthropomorphic creatures, comes up against a heap of rags, discovers hidden rooms and ’little secrets’, manoeuvres away from the deadly seriousness of ancient symbols towards ironic assemblies the artist has collected like ’cabinets of curiosities’, actually exhibited in the cases you might find in a sterile laboratory.
Antufiev’s method, paradoxically as it may seem, excludes the chance, the spontaneity of artistic action: his art (described precisely as a living process and not the result of a collection of artefacts) is reminiscent above all of the poetry of ’flamboyant modernism’, the kind of creative activity typical, for instance, of Paul Celan. Antufiev penetrates to the subcutaneous layer of the world and almost reaches the ’depths’ of truth and revelation, in order to dive back to the surface and show the world the ease of transformation. Like a dolphin turning somersaults over the surface of the water.
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Multimedia Art Museum MAMM
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