Marina Alvitr
Our memory often plays tricks on us. Forgetting the main characters, we remember some details that absorb all our attention with their deliberate vividness and awkward presence. It seems that these details, or objects, affect us more than those really involved in the situation. It is namely this shift in perception that is the subject of Ivan Plusch’s works.
Red balls are both sacral objects that exist between the world of the dead and that of the living (for example, in the legend of Quetzalcoatl from Mayan and Aztec mythology, in which playing ball was a sacral act), and ordinary memories from the Soviet past, in which these toys were deliberately made red. Red, the colour of blood, symbolises war and aggression but, on the other hand, also the continuity of the generations, heredity, and belonging to a particular family.
Red balls are placed in landscapes with a house – symbolising a nest, to which one always returns and wants to remember, cherish. The only problem is that Ivan Plusch paints the entire landscape in a deliberately mechanised manner – with sharp lines, repetitive patterns – resembling theatre stage sets in which it is impossible to live and retain one’s identity. The heroes of the scene flow out of these sets: the flowing is also a process, both mechanical and alive, which symbolises time and memory. The passing of time, oblivion, the house that has become a stage prop, transform the heroes into ghosts... And only the red balls look real and authentic.
There are no heroes left – what remains is the scene of action... However, it looks like a stage set too. Red balls, as the memory of a child’s game, are scattered throughout the picture and resemble fragmented genetic code, present in our blood, which might soon be reassembled...
