Idle days

Despite the attempts of Roland Barth to break the continuity of painting and photography, photo art is still primarily associated with pictorial methods. However, in Camera Lucida Bart finds the origins of photography in the primeval theater, where actors used to paint a living body, passing it for a dead one. According to Bart, photography is akin to “the primeval theater, the tableau vivant, the image of a motionless made-up face, in which a dead man is recognized". Death is the mechanism unifying theater and photography. And the general unconscious meaning is the desire to resurrect the image of the dead. Photography is the domain of death, the reproduction of the momentary, which "took place only once";  photography infinitely repeats what can never be reiterated in the "existential plane", whereas painting is undoubtedly the realm of life, the realm of creation of its own reality with the laws of infinite life. In this case, it is especially interesting to interpret the operation of the reverse mechanism - the picturesque works created by photography, that is, the canvases painted on the basis of photographic images. The movement here is not from life to death, but in the opposite direction, and along its course the resurrection of the image may occur.

The young painter Cyril Garshin from Voronezh in the new series reproduces the photographs from his family album. Accurate copying of the momentary polaroid shots (in which the essence of photography is especially distinct, which Bart wrote about), - thanks to the picturesque means, which require much more time for the completion of the final version of the art work, - adds to the momentary an effect of duration that photography usually destroys. But the duration is not the infinity, and the painting - no matter what - is not immortal. When we look at the result of the painterly experiment closely, we see the same stark characters as in the photos, which - especially in earlier works - abide in some obedient but meaningless waiting, as if they feel their abandonment (a forgotten crown of thorns on a stool) and anticipate the end (an abandoned room with a tree sprouted in it). The artistic image is not resurrected even after the experiment with the "reverse motion". As if having sensed it in the course of the work, Garshin inserts destructive elements into the field of the canvases from the last series: he blurs the motionless faces of the masks, brushing the dead-like stillness inherent to photographs off them and making the painting, which is obviously defeated in this strange competition, gain at least some movement. But the visual dynamics do not add any movement to the core of the photographic and in this case subordinate to it picturesque nature, from under a layer of smooth strokes and clear lines, the unbearable sadness of the old family photographs still breaks through, even if certain festive fun is depicted in them. Over the years any family thins out, and the mechanism of death, which seems to  a person to be a meaningless progeny of a chance, will triumph. Proof of this victory will be a photographic image, the flat death, according to an apt Bart's expression.

 Katya Morozova, Rhinoceros journal, No. 1

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