ORELART PARIS Art Contemporain Russe et International

Emblematic artist of the new generation of Russian contemporary art, Andrei Molodkin is nowadays well known for his hollowed sculptures or containing slogans half-filled with Chechen or Iraqi oil, which stagings combine crude oil barrels and other pipes.
Oil represents our contemporary realities: this is the most ancient energy resource on earth, but also the raw material the most long-desired in the world.
By using it in his work, Molodkin returns to modernism’s roots and its attitude towards art as resource. The idea of its utilization is comparable to the one of its production. And even though oil - as raw material - is an inalienable part of “modernity,” it has never been mythologized by modernists. They only have used it mediated with images - airplanes and automobiles - but no one has ever perceived oil as the “blood” that feeds world economies.
« Oil industry, this is nowadays the flesh and blood of all countries. That’s why I decided to use this material as the only medium able to link the identity and national resources notions. At the same time, oil is the very competitive pretext or the one of a possible tackling between East and West ».
Thereby, any empty form, such as human skull or Jesus on the Cross, becomes a blank matrix that the artist can fill with any material, including any speech: art is no more iconic, but economic.
The exploration of this new medium is Molodkin’s contribution to the “unfinished project” of modernism, by combining an aesthetic idea with a political idea. Using a natural resource like oil is a very strong statement, since oil is the main cause for all the political problems and conflicts in the world today, and has come to represent greed and power.

« This skillful Russian draftsman has a heavy-handed way with popular and political symbols… What’s most interesting… is how [his] enormous drawings are made: entirely with blue ballpoint pen. »

Ken Johnson, The New York Times

« Andrei Molodkin… transmutes geopolitics into astonishing constructions through a daunting chemical process which first hollows out acrylic blocks, then fills the resulting negative-space sculptures of Jesus or the White House with Iraqi crude. The warm, stygian depths of the oil and an intricate system of metal drums, pumps, and snaking hoses imbue [gallery spaces] with an industrial intensity that conjures up the wars and greed underlying our voracious appetite for dead dinosaurs. »

R.C. Baker, The Village Voice