Valentin Dyakonov
I would like to call Ivan Plusсh a cinegenic artist. Not in the sense that his works would look good as videos, – on the contrary, they are best seen and experienced directly, hearing, so to speak, the footsteps of a dinosaur. Rather, it’s about the elusive sensation that makes us press the pause button and take a screenshot at that moment of horror in a thriller when the metamorphosis of a character into a monster (or a mise-en-scène that is key for yet another plot twist) is shown. Regardless of how we relate to what we see, the process of the fantastic revelation of the true nature of a person or thing is fascinating in itself, like a calamity or an avalanche. The essence of this pleasure is described by Kant in the famous lines from “Critique of Pure Reason”: “... the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and such like; these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might. But the sight of them is the more attractive, the more fearful it is, provided only that we are in security; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height, and discover in us a faculty of resistance of a quite different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature”. Kant speaks of nature, but in Plusch’s works the black mass is akin to the organic and inorganic substances that grow out of the mundane, limited by a golden frame or the human body.
In 2004, when everything was (as it now seems) relatively good, Viktor Pelevin embellished his rather boring novel “The Sacred Book of the Werewolf” with a brilliant phrase: “The hope that the brown mass, surrounding on all sides, – is chocolate, melts with every day, even among the most inveterate optimists”. It is reasonable to interpret the evolution of the motif of the black fluid mass in Ivan Plusch’s sculptures and installations in a similar way. In “Torsos”, popular among the curators, it is a plastic counterpoint to wood that imitates 3D modelling, thick, like resin or oil, reflecting the numerous spotlights. In “The Illusion of the Disappearance of Fullness”, the fluid is used as a metaphor for artistic content that disappears and is reborn before our very eyes. Plusch’s new works in the Iragui Gallery seem much more straightforward – the darkness here is called darkness, behaves like darkness and reflects the artist’s mood that has taken possession of him (and not only him) over the last year.
Indeed, our rooms are no longer rooms, but unstable spaces of anxiety. Windows do not reveal the world around, but try to restrain the flows of intentional filth in one form or another from television propaganda to mundane cruelty. It used to seem that the atoms of violence move randomly, discretely. Now, in every malicious intention, one involuntarily (and at the same time fascinatingly) discerns a single will, “links of one damn chain”. Plusch’s latest works are both about how we feel today and about how little it takes to accurately reflect our life. The protest near the White House comes to mind, in which those opposed held totally blank white banners in their hands, because “everything is obvious anyway”. Plusch gives an aesthetic face to pessimism, urging one to see a graphic technique in it, thus subduing it. If uncertainty and instability are visible, then they are already less frightening... And this can give us “courage to measure ourselves against…”.
