ORELART PARIS Art Contemporain Russe et International

Serp, such is the name that the artist has chosen for himself. In French, it’s a strong name, with a violent single syllable which makes one think of a blow given by a peasant, or the scythe of Death. If the sickle was one of the two emblems of the ex-USSR, the billhook is more metaphysical. I am thinking of the alliance by Malevich of the figure of the woodcutter, the occupant of the dacha and of the more abstract construction of shapes and colours.

At the Orel gallery, Serp sets up the scenery: the cabin on the woodcutter’s island. A former prisoner once said that in prison, one can tolerate only three books: The Idiot by Dostoevsky, Don Quixote by Cervantes and Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. These are three novels which redefine the way we look at man, in his difference, in his isolation, with only his inner strength and his dreams. The woodcutter’s island is like the castaway island of Robinson: a place where one must recreate a world from the man. One is no longer entering a forest, but still a prison: the insular world is like a clearing in the forest. In the tales of our childhood, there is always a corner of Siberia with an isba in the snow; but also cabins of where the occupant is absent and due to return. Will the woodcutter return? Between the house of straw, the house of wood and the house of bricks, the Russian artist can only live in the house of wood, like the cabin of Baba-Yaga. This wood, it’s like a body: the logs are the limbs of a scattered body, mutilated as are the shattered windows. Reciprocally, in the pictures, the arms stretch out like tree branches, the skin becomes wood-like.

The broken man, the torso-man with the head cut from the feet, from his tracks in the snow, has difficulty keeping himself upright. How can one re-unite his parts? The repeated framework and patterns, separated out, inverted from popular art (weaving, embroidery, carpets, curtains) are a method used by the artist to find coherence and construction. His images profoundly awake the imagination. The Russian Mikhail Bakhtin explained Rabelais by relating him to popular culture and the carnival. With Serp, the world is equally turned upside down.

The artist has attempted the nudity of animals in the wild. Necro-realist films – those by Yufit for example – hoped for communion with the forest, the water, and that man would be tree and stream, traversed by the vital spirit of the cosmos. Would the taboos of Soviet society melt away during the 1990s in the face of this fantastic and ecological art, in the face of this experience which evoked Eisenstein and Buñuel? But under the rain, the ghosts and the temptation of suicide are born.

Necro-realism: representing the thousand ways of taking one’s own life. Belated punk syndrome? “Gothic”, Russian-style? The Russia full of contradictions, after Gorbachev, Yeltsin, then Putin. But the work of Serp cannot be simplified to a moment, to a society, to the Russian “soul”. It demonstrates a struggle between life and death, where life would not be life , but art, where death would not be death but inertia, the incapacity to give, the impossibility to love : in summary that which prevents the joining of life and art, and makes some of us give up on life. Whether they commit suicide, or whether they exist like dead wood, logs.

From these logs, the woodcutter who chopped them constructs the house. It brings together all the antagonistic forces, it is the ideal of regained unity. The house and not the church, the house and not the palace of the people: even if his adventure adjoins the sacred – the composition of many scenes evokes religious paintings (crucifixions, icons, mandala...) - and the ideological (propaganda images, collective visions), the artist sees the house as an anarchistic utopia, that cannot be given up but can be shared. A world without women, but not without femininity, a world of adults, but full of the dreams of children: the point of view of a man therefore, but which extends to all men.

Serp hits hard: black, black rings under the eyes, xylographic bodies, shadows, the friction of the brushwork which crushes the features, stretches them, engraves them, images brutally painted: like banners, pennants, stretched images, faded, sacrificed: a painting at daggers drawn.

The painting of Serp is a roughly-hewn painting of a harrowing humanity.

Thierry Dufrêne