ORELART UK PARIS Art Contemporain Russe et International

The last image

They are disturbingly strange, these obscure places with their singular architectural aesthetic - these desolate, deserted places devoid of people. These over-identified international capitals that are lifeless but for statues and wooden horses. Shabelnikov delves into the hinterlands of the collective imaginary with his Hugoesque view of the quays below Notre Dame, his Red Square under a Vlaminck-like sky, his vision of the arcades in front of St Peter's in Rome, or low-angle perspective of New York's skyscrapers taken from Brooklyn bridge ¨¤ la Vieira da Silva. His dramatic sequences are anything but comic and the omnipresent hostile rain takes on a magical realism. Somewhat more fantastical are the illuminated ferry from Amarcord, and a fairground inspired by Fellini's 8 1/2, Bergman's Sawdust and Tinsel, or Strangers on a Train by Hitchcock.
Yuri Shabelnikov delights in staging widely known, romantic settings, as much for their popular symbolism as for the parody. From social conflicts to fratricidal wars, his political vision of communal spaces feeds on an aversion to symptomatic mass fanaticism, which even extends to the football field. Painted in 2006, Requiem ¨¤ la volont¨¦ 1 consisted in a series of monochromatic grey paintings peopled with figures more or less assembled into idealist battalions. In using such archetypes to create caricatures of the bellicose allegories of socialist realism, his universe stigmatises gregarious aspects of nationalist sentiment. His many-coloured reading of Lenin's mausoleum reinforced his sardonic view of the State's ability to intimidate even after death.
While remaining faithful to monochrome painting, Shabelnikov has broken away from his charcoal grey frescoes to explore the deep blue of the earthly twilight that embraces the world's great capitals. His gaze on these symbolic theatres manifests itself through the word "fin", or end, which is repeated throughout his works: Fin, The End, Fine, §¬§à§ß§Ö§è... This universal term is neither "dubbed" nor subtitled - thereby highlighting the tragedy and inevitability of time, the destiny of all adventures, the end of all things, the limit beyond which dreams are no longer acceptable. Through these frozen images the artist draws the spectator back towards the light of reality prematurely.
As if he were holding onto the idea that the frontier between the image - or imagined film - and the three-dimensional exhibition space was no wider than a cinema screen or framed canvas, the anachronistic print "projected" onto the pictorial screen relays and renews the role of the metal cut-outs in Requiem ¨¤ la volont¨¦: it eludes, but does not infringe, the established rules of two-dimensional representation.
Sitting in the foreground, the vanishing point in this non-rewindable film at once captivates and dismisses the gaze, creating a dual movement of attraction and repulsion. In other words, it simultaneously evokes a fictional scene and challenges the legitimacy of earlier scenes. By linking this freeze-frame with a visual invitation that attracts us from some considerable distance, Shabelnikov traps the spectator in the quick-sand of a completed action written in the low-points of a film that will never be. By invalidating all romantic velleities, he anesthetises the fictional narrative implicitly in the interests of an enigmatic narrative that takes place off-camera, in which invisible, fleshless actors eternally haunt an ephemeral scenario.
In the end, in borrowing his aesthetic from the seventh art, by placing a mirror between the spectator and the plot that he never actually elaborates, Shabelnikov nourishes the conclusion but disputes the rhetoric that should have preceded it. This semiological tool borrows more from literary or philosophical distortion than artistic or sociological distortion, such as that of Support Surface, for example. In engendering this rupture in Brunelleschi's trompe l'oeil, upon which the sacrosanct illusion of depth is founded, he puts the spotlight on the narrative conventions of film, which have remained inviolate since the Allegory of the Cave.
Through the detachment applied to the dark theatres, Shabelnikov's ghostly film club forces the gaze to bow to his own vision. He reviews the limits of History - the history of civilisation, of the spectacle - buried as it is beneath its own symbols.

St¨¦phan L¨¦vy-Kuentz