Modern life is impossible without the communications. Letters, signs, numbers, and symbols are so strongly embedded in cultural and social usage that it is difficult to imagine otherwise. The existence of various types of writing has become quite commonplace, requiring no special training or skills. Kaluga artist Vladimir Marin uses this feature and unity of everyday language in his new exhibition.
In fact, the current exhibition combines three large projects focused on emphasizing the diverse ways of communication between people. Despite the differences in the types and materials that the artist has chosen to implement his ideas, they all explore a common problem of reproducing and communicating a certain semantic meaning. Being in one endless information stream, sometimes it is difficult to separate the necessary data fr om the background. The artist suggests paying attention to this issue, presenting all the variety of signs, letters and symbols that have been an inseparable part of everyday life so long, but have not lost their unique way of transmitting the meaning information.
Vladimir Marin created the installation Writing as the special project for the Ural Industrial Biennale in 2015. It is the large-scale interconnected iron sheets, which concentrates evidence left by employees of the Demidovsky factory. They were welded on floor slabs for better grip with shoes, forming embossed images (from abstract patterns to quite specific signatures). Marin turns them into walls, creating a kind of industrial labyrinth with primitive drawings by non-professional artists.
The work 12 Colours is also devoted to the interpretation of "folk urban art" in the form of drawings and titles. This is a competition for the endurance of statements made in a single space by different people. Technical inscriptions, requests, creative attempts, revelations, and just a desire to leave a mark. Each expression has its own colour and it sounds until the marker runs out. In the beginning, it is a dense polyphony, wh ere nothing can be analyze. Gradually, everything changes. Some disappear quickly, others late. In the end, there is nothing left.
Vladimir Marin directly uses the letters of the alphabet in his project of the same name. However, you need to try to distinguish them. Appeals, confessions, advertising of prohibited means. At the next glance, all this is awkwardly corrected and painted over. A kind of understatement, hidden behind a layer, drawn on top of the grid, which gives impetus to the emergence of a new symbolism of the streets. The fantastic alphabet, received in an attempt to eliminate it.
Continuing the tradition of artists of the Moscow Conceptual School, who worked on the theme of everyday life, using the text to enhance the artistic content, Vladimir Marin "pulls" it to the fore. Thus, aspects that were important for conceptualists are changed: in Marin's interpretation, the word and symbol become dominant in relation to the everyday context. Nevertheless, they share a common desire to romanticize the image passed through the poetic perception of the surrounding reality.
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