Cosa Mentale
by Eugenia Kikodze, art historian, critic, and curator
Alexander Morozov always surprises for the breath of his artistic aspirations. He makes paintings, creates works that look like models and sketches of build- ings from a penitentiary complex, writes texts, immortalizes in marble long- forgotten philosophical terms, takes pictures and even records the flights of birds from the balcony of his studio — incidentally, this work won the jury of on small but cutting edge awards and received the special mention prize.
Is understanding the feelings of the contemporary art lovers so dissimilar to the flight of birds, which can be easily associated to artistic freedom and imagination, to the independence and indomitability of art? However, the issue of creative freedom in Alexander Morozov is not as simple as it might seem. Despite the wide specter of his interests, the artist is far from being impulsive. In particular, the immediacy of his actions is in fact far from impulsiveness. On the contrary, it would be worth mentioning the other pole of what is called spontaneity: reasonableness, exact calculation and close attention to detail. Mobility and composure in the artist's character make us think of mercury. In an interview, Pavel Pepperstein, the guru of the Moscow Young Conceptualists (also called “Psychedelic Realism”), said that the most valuable feature in an artist is his ability to listen to the noise from outside when go- ing through a storm of passions, to strive, so to speak, to dream letting the air through from the window. It is possible to feel a light draught of irony in all of Morozov's gloomyly dreamlike canvases, like for example the pink and corn- flower blue lambskin swirls in “Easter Procession”.
But we must jump to the end. We must instead take into consideration the principle of separateness, which is so important in “Cosa Mentale”. In these paintings there is some sort of separation and isolation — at least for what concerns the outside — as in the title itself. Somehow, all these intimate, small, and carefully painted works are related to cabbage soup: the recipe of this traditional dish has been carefully rewritten by the artist. Viewers can learn about all the stages of its preparation, all movements — slicing, blanching, stabilizing, and so on. The mysterious magic of the gestures hidden in the recipe resonates as the alchemical kitchen of painting: rubbing pigment, mixing the emulsion, making the primer. Besides all the cross-references in the process of cutting, splitting and mixing, the recipe of this traditional dish refers to the universal and impersonal, because it has no author, “lyrics and music from tradition”. The same anonymity can be seen in each subject. They are as caught by the flash of a mobile phone from the flow of everyday life. As a matter of fact, they deliver no message. These reflections, chandeliers, napes and hats can be read as the disembod- ied husk of a reproduction, if not the specifically bodily and material flow of the painting. Their smallness and fragmentation makes them «icons» of the virtual world. These scraps from everyday life, made with the technology of real icons (they are painted using egg tempera on chalk boardswith gesso), are surpris- ingly dense and heavy. Their physicality is exaggerated by the sharp disjunction between the form of a kite and the material, boards on crossbars with oak dowels (to prevent humidity to bend the wood). First of all, the complex shapes of the boards call to mind the traditions of conquering the higher spheres, these “snake-like” curls-envelopes after hundreds of years of evolution have become a form of sending a message, that ideographic writing which a Homo habilis, a man skilled, in metaphysics possesses. “I create a thing, my presence embodies the tangible experience of addressing the sky — a cosa mentale of a human being” says the artist.
SIMPLE THINGS
by Polina Mogilina, senior curator at MaxArt Foundation, Tel Aviv
Alexander Morozov snatches the most ordinary, miniscule, unremarkable fragments, details and scenes from everyday life. Ceiling lamps swinging in the draft, frozen in silent expectation of a new working day at the porcelain factory, rain water gushing out of the gutter, uniforms of overcoats and fur caps hanging on rows of hooks in the cloakroom. Alexander Morozov's works seem to completely lack narrative. There is no subject, no movement, no time. It is a still frame, the main actors, or rather, the inactive characters are the objects themselves, occasionally and completely only their fragments. As children we start perceiving the world with reference to the things around us.
Examining our surroundings, we form a corresponding set of qualities and characteristics which help us to automatically define and perceive them in that way from then on. The things and objects around us, in fact, define the physicality of the world in which we exist. We generally think, there is nothing special, nothing unique in these objects themselves. We pass them everyday, not even slowing down to give them the smallest glance so ordinary they seem to us.
But it is worth stopping to glance and take a closer look at the internal, unspoken dialogue that these objects have with our subconscious, how they acquire a completely different, at times mysterious or scared significance. A word uttered many times in a row suddenly loses its original meaning and starts to sound like some sort of primitive incarnation, a set of symbols and codes.
The painting technique that the artist works with, egg tempera on board with chalk gesso, is complex and time consuming. It is a lengthy process. Looking at Alexander Morozov's work is the same—long, meditative, probing within, beyond the visible outer shell. The apparent realism of the artist's work is in fact mythical, like a mirage in the desert, ready to dissipate at any moment. The reality surrounding a person is intense and dominating: it trails off, as if shifting to another plain, giving way to meditative contemplation. Staring at these pictures as if catching a glimpse of a kaleidoscope flashing before the eyes of daily life, Alexander Morozov invites us to see beyond familiar external characteristics to the presence of an inner self hidden beyond a fleeting glace. But what will we find there, beyond the visible shell? Footprints of memoires radiating from objects? Or a metaphysical essence within them, existing unrelated to a person?
What Do You See?
by Stanislav Savitsky, Ph.D.
What do we see when we see simple things? A captured instant, from which the ideas and substances that put us in touch with historical experience have been removed? A fragment of someone's private life devoid of significance for those who have no involvement in it? A simulated political actuality shining through ordinary pictures and allotting us the role of viewers of media productions? Or deceptions indicating the possible existence of some reality?
We see beautiful flowers. Beautiful like those on vinyl tablecloths, on wallpaper, on greetings cards. We see a tramp curled up in one of the passages of the Metro. Poor wretch! We see a coat rack with the greatcoats and winter hats of officer cadets who have come for an excursion in the Marble Palace. Some people have all the luck! We see the Pope at prayer — and the dismantling of the monument to Stalin in Tbilisi. We see the room in a Japanese prison where death sentences are carried out — and a table used in burial services at a Lutheran church.
What is this kaleidoscope of mobile photographs, illustrations from the Russky Reporter magazine, journalistic shots recording epochal moments and haunting images that were so prized by Eugne Atget and Roland Barthes? In this melee of visual impressions and photographic records our life takes place. We live out our days flicking through glossy magazines, scrolling through Facebook, snapping sights that interest us on a mobile phone, channel-hopping on the TV and noticing out of the corner of our eye, between an illuminated billboard and an advertising video running on a huge plasma
panel, the reflection of a puzzled face in the window of a passing bus. It sticks in the memory like some phantasm obscuring this visual confusion with a surrealist delusion.
Alexander Morozov's multi-component painting captures this modern-day optical phenomenon, monumentalizing the arrested instant in large-format pictures. On one canvas wellworn shoes have arranged themselves ceremoniously and wonderfully in several rows in the entrance hall of a house in Istanbul. On another a woman tram driver emerges in an epic manner from the aniline semidarkness of a twilight street. The freeze frames and haunting visions are also painted in egg tempera on gesso. They are iconic images of lost time. The panels record a recombination of visual idioms. The visible world becomes dissimilated. Objects are displayed next to some of the panels: a shaggy bat sealed up in acrylic glass; a demijohn on its side containing a handful of sand; a fragment of a column covered with keys.
The world breaks down into fleeting images, disconnected pictures and items that seem to be a vision or surrealist objects. Alexander Morozov's realism project is founded upon the defamiliarization of contemporary vision – setting aside the habit of seeing the world as it is represented by visual culture. The artist invites us to reconstruct for ourselves the meanings of this dis-integrated visible reality. Some participants in the project express their own insights and thoughts about how some of the depictions and objects might be interpreted. The viewer, too, assembles from the elements of post-conceptualist visual space that reality which he or she is able to grasp. Alexander Morozov is attentive to the everyday, like the French Realists and the Russian Itinerants. He searches out in actuality an “objective” hallucinatory element in a way that was characteristic of the Surrealists. His analysis of the visual resurrects the alchemic painting of Sigmar Polke, reproducing the rhetoric of the illusory nature of photo-realism and photo a retrospective view of the previous historical experience. Nor is there nowadays a utopian fixed gaze into the future.
Art is posed questions by current life itself with its hypnotic banality:the pattern of cracks on a reassembled cup reminded one of the participants in the project of the map of Ukraine.