Contacts of the gallery founders

Ksenia Kruglova: +7 903 756-04-35
Victoria Beilis: +7 985 810-68-38

Yanita Voight
The escape.

Exploring aesthesis as the basis of her own creative impulse, the artist raises the problem of the relationship between reality and the imaginary, everyday optics and the irrational feeling of enchantment, as well as the transformation of this feeling in the structure of the urban lifestyle in relation to communities closer to nature. The idea of a possible “enchantment of the world,” described by Michelle Maffesoli in the perception of modern man, or, in other words, “the optics of the miraculous,” as well as the phenomenon of the “social divine,” described by E. Durkheim, form the basis of the artist’s practical and theoretical research. At the same time, the focus is on the break of “Western man” with the mystical component of life, and his existential loneliness in a silent, unresponsive world, which is described by many authors of the 20th century, both in fiction, philosophical and psychological literature: C. Castaneda, M Buber, E. Hemingway, M. Heidegger and others touch on this problem of a “progressive” society.

Being just such a modern resident of a big city, whose aesthesis contains both “the optics of the miraculous” and rational filters that alienate sensory perception from the mythical, mythological, sacred part of the worldview, the artist uses the method of maximum immersion in the life of the studied non-urban communities, analysis and collection anthropological, cultural and ethnographic data and artifacts, drawing on my professional background and education in the field of intercultural communication: “And I’m always looking for the key to these worlds, trying to penetrate and try to think like them, live like them, feel what they feel. Get in the same boat with them as much as possible. I understand that even with this approach this coloniality is inevitable in me, which is one way or another part of my identity, but I come to them to learn like a child. I collect their literature, interview them, help with the housework, play with the children, listen to the stories of their elders in an attempt to understand and feel from the inside why they end up where they are.”

On the one hand, when it comes to the aesthesis of a resident of the capital of the metropolis and a resident of a small ethnic group on its outskirts, it is difficult to avoid the big theme of colonial discourse, while the artist’s desire to gain experience of life and interaction with people in close contact with nature is associated to a greater extent with the search contact with that universal human source of the mythical, syncretic, “wonderful” worldview, which, according to the work on the collective unconscious of Carl Jung, unites all peoples and all tribes through the phenomenon of “archetypes” - an element of the collective unconscious, similarly manifested in myths, fairy tales and legends and artistic creativity of various peoples of the world.

In the process of creating the “Escape” project, the artist, inspired by the stories of travel writers Mikhail Yankovsky and Fedoseev, who experienced the departure from the city to nature, sets off on an expedition to the Far East.
“I found a reliable guide and went on a journey and ended up in the place that Fedoseev described, and where his friend, hunter, tracker, Evenk Ulukitkan, was from. This place is Bomnak. There was a journey that gave the experience of hunting, life without meeting people at a distance of many kilometers in the cold among the ice, shamanic stories and the experience of refining feelings in the taiga, awareness of the subtlety of the matter of this world, its honesty and vulnerability, understanding of the laws by which it exists and communicates with the inhabitants,” the artist describes her experience.

Upon her return, the artist creates a series of works over the course of a year in which the optics of life close to nature and the collective myth penetrates the urban body and transforms it. The works convey the borderline nature of the artist’s perception of the urban environment through the “optics of the miraculous”, a kind of mutual deconstruction of spaces occurs, on the basis of which, through a broken perspective, characters connected by classical compositional techniques, but at the same time seemingly still located in different space-time dimensions, Due to varying degrees of integrity and elaboration of the images, as well as different external stylistics, uncertainty, brokenness, and “borderlines” of the artist’s paintings are born. In the created images one can also see a touch of apocalypticism, as if “terribly wonderful”, which may be an unconscious reflection of the current crisis historical moment.

Not least important is the frame of creation of this series within the framework of Vladimir Dubossarsky’s “Modern Painting” workshop at the HSE School of Design. As the master notes: “The project is interesting due to the combination of the classical heritage of the Renaissance and modern rough painting, the use of many painting techniques, techniques and materials. The introduction of fellow students in the group into the paintings, like mythical heroes, gives the paintings a special charm of “homeliness” and the personal presence of the author.”

The very technique of creating the work also reflects the antagonism between the urban and the natural, the myth