"Coziness and Razumov" exhibition is a collaborative project by Ivan Razumov and the PPSS art group, consisting of Sonya Stereostyrski and Pavel Pepperstein. The exhibition is dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the USSR dissolution.
Art history infuses the idea that every era, every period obtains its summarizing image within a specific object of art, creating a certain symbol or crest of the time. This particular emblematic incarnation is then assigned to a period in question as its more or less anchored depiction.
In a sense, Malevich's "Black Square" and the portrait of Louis XIV differ from each other no more, and no less than the era of French absolutism differs from the age of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde of the early 20th century.
We, the masters of brush, pencil, and mouse, wonder — wittingly or not — what the summing image of our days might be. Yes, we wonder, yet we have no distinct answer. We can't even find anything indistinct! The only thing we can afford is to shrug our shoulders (or legs) in bewilderment. This movement is displayed at this exhibition (sub-installation) in the form of three magnificent frames, begging to frame grand canvases, with piercing insight testifying to the spirit of our times. But (guided not so much by modesty as by honesty), we only allow these frames to enframe the emptiness of the white wall. We could have stopped at the achieved results, but in this case, our sub-installation would have acquired an overly ambitious, unjustifiably manifesto-like, frankly speaking, nauseatingly modernist tone. To get rid of this nausea and declare that we are modest workers of the art division and not some palette charlatans, we humbly hang our unpretentious works around these glorious frames, each of them obeying a stream of unpredictable circumstances, has a vague, but an irresistible chance to become an icon of our days and take pride of being placed inside one of the distinguished frames.
22 Dec 2021
Pavel Pepperstein
Open Studios
Free of Charge 