Raw Fireworks of Indigo
What distinguishes the Indigo, a Purring Court exhibition unveiled at the RA gallery of the Kyiv House of Artists is its riot of colors and contrasting artistic temperaments. The Terraces Art Group (the trio of Ilona Sylvasha, daughter of Tiberius Sylvashy, founder of Picturesque Preserve; Yuri Yermolenko; and Yaroslav Prysiazhniuk) calls its canvases “communications” in the multimedia fashion. As Ilona Sylvasha explained, this genre definition stems from the very concept of this exhibition. Each picture here is connected and communicated with the other canvases, and in fact all the three artists’ works are linked looking a single picture looking like a broad portrayal of one picturesque event. This cinematic touch was strongly reinforced by the premiere of two videos: Ilona Sylvasha’s and Yaroslav Prysiazhniuk’s cartoon, A Green Cat, and Yuri Yermolenko’s short, Terra Indigo. The films, video projected onto a white wall, accurately finished the picturesque scenery with the same riot of color and similar images that came from the canvases to the celluloid.
The cartoon, A Green Cat (by all account, the exhibition’s central piece), made at the Rapan studios, is a series of communications-related images and compositions practically without any plot: semi-abstract silhouettes, a totally abstract soundtrack, and a staggering dance of computerized painting. All in all quite a boring spectacle. And the point is not only in the audiences’ laziness. The green cat exercise would have been of intrinsic value if this unusual animal had embodied some deeper matters which could generate substantial interest as a desire to make up a figurative puzzle which the artists carefully pigeonhole into their “communications.” Indigo, a Purring Court fully resembles all these video exercises, is linked to them by the same chain of flaws, and sags under the pressure of many, still immature, aspirations. The dazzling, at times gaudy, color combinations flow across the canvas quite waywardly but without whirlpools or rapids.
Still, we should admit the exhibition is something to talk about. For not a single new art group has made such a strong and all-out show in Kyiv and Ukraine as a whole over the past few years. Moreover, these people seem to know exactly why they have come and what they are going to do. The have a standpoint, clearly pronounced persuasions, and an ideology of their own with which they intend to fill, in the nearest future, their own niche in an artistic landscape that wants revamping. There seems to be no reason why we should pour scorn on this intention of theirs.
In short, it was a raw, unfinished, but a spectacular display of fireworks.
