Frame Break
The exhibition “Frame Break” at Ruarts Gallery in Moscow (05.25 – 07.02.2011) is a complex project that was first developed as a scenography for a performance. The project includes both the theme of movement and change of theme, since the works presented at the exhibition are capable of transformation and play with the viewer.
The title “Frame Break”, literally “a broken frame”, is understood here as a desire to break the usual “framework”. In Russian, the word “рама (frame)” is too material, while in English it is included in various more general philosophical and linguistic constructions, denoting the format of representation, in other words, the way in which we form our idea of the world. But this general construction also serves for a more specific, personal definition of the attitude to the world as a whole and the surrounding concrete reality.
Interview with Natalia Smolianskaia by Elena Sedova
Video, interview.
In this conversation, Natalia Smolianskaia speaks about how the idea of the project was born and what preceded the work on the project. The issues that concern her here include the theme of absence, the theme of the doppelgänger, and playing games with yourself. Hence, the theme of the active viewer is also important for the artist.
What does the broken frame mean? There are two lines here – existential and institutional. The art world itself has become so institutionalized that the existence of an artist outside this institution is simply impossible. Any criticism will be swallowed up. And the existential theme means overcoming boundaries that also exist in the form of rules and rituals, everyday life and routine.
Movement
I have always liked to make constructions from paper that are not static, that can change. It is interesting to create works where the frames are broken, where you can step beyond the edges of the picture, go beyond the plane.
Natalia Smolianskaia
The theme of movement, human position and its exit from a certain coordinate system appears in the collaboration on performances with the group “The Blind”. Thus, performative works are created, designed for active perception and interaction.
The project, which began with the theme of performance, is concentrated on movement expressed in different materials. The main leitmotif is the figure and the frame, the figure striving to get out of the “frame”, beyond the boundaries understood through such different contexts as physical interaction and everyday life situations.
“Frame Break”, from the series “Movement” #4, experiments with frames, 2010, oil on canvas, polystyrene, 130×130
Dynamism of loss. Text: Valentin Dyakonov.
The new series of works by Natalia Smolianskaia is connected with movement. The artist interprets two types of movement. The first is related to the plasticity of the human body, its position in space. The second is related to the transfer of movement in painting and drawing, individual interpretations of the experiments of futurism and suprematism.
Valentin Dyakonov
“Dialogue of the Arts” No. 3, 2011
Interaction
Photo: Marc Bonneville
The possibility of interaction with the works is resolved in different ways: you can move geometric elements, such as frames and borders, or you can shift the image in relation to the “frame” – e.g. to the frame in graphic works.
Therefore, the exhibition consisted of unfinished works, it was work in progress, so any viewer could take part in the process of its creation.
«Frame break» #3, 2010, vekaplan, magnet, steel tape, oil, 150 x 150;
«Frame break» #11, 2011, paper, polystyrene, acrylic, 62×70
Natalia Smolianskaia: Suprematism in a Ruined Outline.
Text: Vitaly Patsyukov
gouache, watercolor on paper, 61×70
The work of Natalia Smolianskaia strives to preserve the ‘corporeal’ in artistic expression, combining the sensual and the intellectual, the figurative and the semantic, examining the world as a holistic unity, bringing together the polarities of its existence.
Vitaly Patsyukov July 20
In the last phase of Suprematism,
reality returns to its contours.
Kazimir Malevich
Contemporary reality is losing its living immediacy, traditional sensory basis, being replaced by conceptual symbols and images. Its imagery gravitates towards the “text” revealed in media technologies; it is directed towards the reduction of visual dimensions, losing the phenomenality of “folds” and baroque excess. The work of Natalia Smolianskaia is in clear opposition to this vector of civilization and culture. It strives to preserve the “corporeal” in artistic expression, combining the sensual and intellectual, the figurative and the semantic, examining the world in a holistic unity, bringing together the polarities of its existence. The exhibition project “Frame break” can be considered as a total installation, “composed” of paintings-objects and video projection. The paintings in this installation, masterfully painted, combining abstraction with the imagery of the female figure, cease to exist in classical painting technologies. They turn into special constructions, limiting their contours to suprematist profiles. The ideology of K. Malevich, preserved by Natalia Smolianskaia in these post-paintings, begins to evolve towards neo-baroque.
«Frame break» # 5, 2010, «Frame break» # 3, 2007-2009, «Frame break» # 2, 2007:
Its visual archetypes are translated into a kind of baroque facade, into a “screening”, which Marcel Duchamp spoke about at the beginning of the twentieth century. Suprematist baroque not only screens, but also forms the artistic object, it strategically pulls it together, subordinates the centripetal energy of the image and at the same time expands its coordinate system, its boundaries, “revealing suprematist contours”, as K. Malevich said. Painting itself in this new artistic structure symbolizes a special value and significance, acquiring a kind of “frame” and turning into an iconic construction. It reveals an internal dimension, the ability to “look out” and “hide”, to shimmer with crystals of “children’s secrets”. Its image opens up with a mystery, a miracle, magical states, surrounded by the ideal geometry of Euclidean. The theory of relativity has no power here, art in this paradigm returns to the ancient state, to the “golden age” of proportions and numerical series. The Suprematist “frames” of Natalia Smolianskaia, accumulating energy, acquire a dynamic vector; the surface of the painting, crossed by colored diagonal ribbons of plastic, begins to resemble an architectural order, or, sharpened by social meaning, a new national order, a relevant breast badge. The female figure, subordinated to the rhythmic organization of the work, asserts the special significance of this award – its semantic center. It lives with its plastic changes like an antique vase plot, intersecting with the space of Meyerhold’s biomechanics, the searches of Yves Klein and the dance performances of Pina Bausch. Its imagery dissolves in the abstract painting of the “new wild ones”, it plunges into the rapid stroke of the artist’s brush, but does not leave its autonomous zone, its locality, where each independent phase of the movement of the human body focuses the assertion of the anthropic principle of the universe.
The synthesis of forms, which Natalia Smolianskaia seems to demonstrate with sufficient clarity, appears before us in a “disturbed” state, a situation of non-linear equilibrium. The artistic object in the process of synthesis turns into an organism, into a subject, it is transformed in the gaze, approaching Duchamp’s projects, coinciding with its details, constructive semantic elements, creating a special rhyme with the legendary object “Large Glass”. This phenomenon is described by Rosalind Krauss, considering the new optics of alternative art as “Duchampian, based on the attraction to vision.” The different internal rhythms that form Natalia Smolianskaia’s paintings-objects (static painting with a figure in continuous motion, and Suprematist elements inclined to dynamic equilibrium) reveal to us the artist’s creative principles – “disturbed” crystallization of forms, change of scales, angles, local perspectives, Deleuzian folds “smoothed out” in the plane, withdrawal into the depths and appearance from the depths.
Returning to the analysis of the polarity of plastic forms of Rosalind Krauss’s concept, we can repeat after her: “the continuous and calm no longer exist. Some kind of dance is everywhere.” The plastic dance, “plotwise” accompanying each composition of the artist, testifies to a unique program, a code embedded in the integral of its states. Perhaps Natalia Smolianskaia encrypts in her sensory signs the drama that the human body experiences – its displacement by scanning forms, the instrumentality of cloning and biotechnological mutations. The relevance of this process in the installations of “Break Frame” is emphasized by the performance of Anna Kuznetsova from the group “Blind”, realized in a direct dialogue with Natalia Smolianskaia and according to her scenario. Anna Kuznetsova’s body becomes a conductor, a living human “reed” in Buddhist dimensions. It is wrapped in fabric as a secret, unfolding and gathering again as a bundle of meanings, a cosmic antenna, opening up as a parachute, whose dome, like a celestial sphere, Kazimir Malevich tried to pierce, breaking away from the planet Earth. Two light sources direct the projection of the performance artist’s movement onto a white screen. A black shadow, suggesting, manifesting a different “volume” than three dimensions, floats, turning into a double on the screen, continuously in contact with the original. It forms with its “black” plane, its “black” presence an exit beyond zero of forms, allowing the action to be recorded on digital technologies, in literal agreement of 0 and 1.
Crossroads. Perfomance by the group “The Blind”.
Concept and scenography by Natalia Smolianskaia
The performance from the series, developing the theme of the double, by the group “The Blind” and Natalia Smolianskaia took place in May 2003.
Dance: Anna Kuznetsova.
Scenography: Natalia Smolianskaia and the group “The Blind”.
Music: Kuzma Markovnikov
It was shown once at the Sam Brook gallery in Moscow.
Exhibition at Ruarts Gallery
Alexander Gorshkov
The Frame Break exhibition took place from May 25 to July 2, 2011 at the Ruarts Gallery, Moscow. The exhibition featured interactive objects made of vekaplan (PVC) with magnetic elements, collages of paintings and their specific boundaries that they sought to violate, video works, a recording of the performance “Crossroads”, staged jointly with the group “The Blind”, performer Anna Kuznetsova.
Frame Break Project Catalog
The catalogue was published with the support of the House of Abstract Painting KollerArtHouse and Ruarts Gallery
Authors of the texts: Valentin Dyakonov, Kirill Svetlyakov, Natalia Smolianskaia
Photography: Georgy Kiesewalter, Alexander Savelyev, Vladislav Efimov, Natalia Smolianskaia, Kirill Chelushkin
Translation: Georg Kiesewalter, Natalia Smolianskaia, Odile Belkeddar, Guillaume Garreta, Céline Mansanti
