Irina Drozd
Almost all people hope to have a seaside holiday, especially people living in big cities. Everyone tries to find paradise on Earth, to snuggle into the very bosom of Nature. When we think about a rest at the seaside, we are always anticipating an approaching joy. Few consider Nature to be the elements. If you ask, “What are you afraid of?”, the reply is most often, “Heights!” Less often, “Water!” Almost everyone has these fears. But height and water are the mountains and the sea (the ocean). If you imagine that you are alone and surrounded by the sea – deep, with its own life, inhabitants, with its own rules – one begins feeling rather ill-at-ease... The gentle sea in an instant becomes scary, formidable, sinister... Ivan Plusch’s project wishes that we should “Have a good rest” and shows us seemingly beautiful coastal landscapes. But for some reason looking at the empty sunbeds or at the sky flowing over the red “Coca-Cola” umbrellas makes one’s flesh creep. It is as if the stream of paint wants to wash everything away, like the raging elements washing away houses, cities in their path...
The sky erases the border between time and timelessness, threatening to extend “the rest” indefinitely.
This is a subtle allegory of the essence of human life. We know the length of our vacation at the resort, but do we know how long the aching feeling of fear will return? Perhaps all our lives...
A “lull before the storm” is felt in an abandoned life jacket, a rubbish bin and the empty tables depicted in Plusch’s works. Man always strives for stability and peace. However, he reaches his most stable state in death. In Plusch’s “Have a Good Rest” there is the fear of rest, of stopping, and the fear of being on one’s own in the World of breakneck speeds. A pause is a little death. Stopping is inevitable. A “thing” disappears. A thing is like a symbol, like a clue to the familiar and clear. A “thing” is like a life jacket. Things of the coastal zone…
