Alisa Gorelova
Andrey Syaylev
Oleg Khvostov
Anton Konukhov
Andrey Volkov
Oleg Ustinov
Kirill Ermolin-Lugovskoy

Pleats of matter / folds of the soul: this is the metaphorical image of Baroque philosophy as it has taken root in contemporary culture. Thanks to postmodernist interpreters, the "fold" has become an enduring motif associated with the early modern period, the very dawn of modernity. The act of bending or folding implies matter in motion: perhaps matter in the passive voice, the fabric of being convulsively crumpled by an unseen hand; or perhaps an immanent, latent stirring within the fabric itself. Affect made manifest in the body: matter contracting in a spasm, an intensely sensuous image, a contemporary refraction of the Baroque fold. It is precisely this image that became the point of departure for the exhibition at PA Gallery. Each one of the participating artists interprets the motif of the fold in their own way, a motif laden with historical and cultural associations while evoking affects particular to the contemporary condition.

Purely formal commonality is not the exhibition’s sole organizing principle. Each exhibition room is devoted to a dialogue between contemporary artists and the history of art. Art history is often presented as a neatly ordered narrative, a linear account of steady progression from past to future. Consequently, a contemporary artist who deliberately engages in dialogue with the art of the past is frequently perceived as a revivalist or a reactionary. Today, art history is also often imagined as a storeroom, a cramped space where obsolete visual forms and perennial themes are unceremoniously piled up. Instead of a tidy narrative or a dusty storeroom, our exhibition proposes the metaphor of the fold. Viewed from this perspective, art history appears as matter, as fabric that periodically gathers into drapery and folds, bringing distant sections of the fabric into contact with one another. In this way, the artists establish connections with the art of the past while remaining attuned to the present.
The exhibition unfolds across two spaces at PA Gallery.

Works from Anya Zholud’s Separate Line series serve as both an epigraph to the exhibition and an interlude within it. In her distinctive artistic language, Zholud reinterprets a classic subject of artistic study: drapery. Artists of the past, from Leonardo da Vinci to Alexander Ivanov, from Albrecht Dürer to Mikhail Vrubel, honed their skills through the study of folds. Zholud’s three-dimensional drawing fits naturally into this tradition. Yet her focus shifts from draped fabric to folds in the most fundamental element of drawing: the line. For the artist, folds in the line have become a formal motif in their own right. Despite their economy of means, these minimalist sculptures are charged with affective tension. The sharp angles and abrupt rises and falls of the line evoke an erratic pulse, fragments of a graph, or the convulsions of a drawing.

Alisa Gorelova creates a hypnotic, glitch-infused take on a Baroque fresco. Intertwined bodies, rendered in the manner of non finito, evoke both mythological narratives and contemporary body horror. The sensuality of her work is ambivalent: we might be witnessing fragments of struggle, clawing, some unnamed -machy, or perhaps these are lovers’ caresses, trembling tenderness, and shadows of touch. The multitude of graceful hands might also suggest a kind of storyboard of movement, such as the ceaseless work of the three Moirai, their hands playing with the threads of fate, at once tender and merciless. Once again, an oscillation between tenderness and cruelty.

For Kirill Ermolin-Lugovsky, a restoration banner, a drape concealing a reality in ruins, serves as an eloquent metaphor for the current state of culture. The artist creates a contemporary variation on the Baroque trompe-l’œil genre: employing the familiar, slick aesthetic of construction-site banners, he depicts the destruction of the Izoterma house-commune, an avant-garde architectural landmark, on an actual false façade. This turns the ubiquitous urban illusion inside out. By mimicking the flat, thoroughly anonymized style of forced renovation, the artist highlights the predatory paradox of “civilized destruction.” Such false façades function as the urban equivalent of the soothing reassurance that “everything is fine and as it should be.” Yet by depicting ruins on one of these surfaces, the artist introduces a glitch into the normative perception of reality. The restoration banner thus becomes the very fabric of an urban reality in which the avant-garde triumphs over standardized Euro-style renovation.

Andrey Syaylev continues and reinforces this architectural theme with works from his series The Rupture. The blankets, whose patterns evoke the rhythmic rows of windows found on (post-)Soviet prefabricated apartment blocks, are riddled with holes, burn marks, and tears. Such are the domestic mishaps born of inattention: a blanket scorched by an iron when someone gets carried away in conversation. An absorbing conversation around the kitchen table. Lost in thought, someone lets a lit cigarette fall onto a blanket. In these wounded objects, emblems of enveloping domestic comfort and familiar companions to intimate conversations at home, the artist sees a paraphrase of global conflicts.
In his series The Only Possible Position, Oleg Ustinov places the recognizable checkered pattern of a shuttle trader’s travel bag within the context of the history of abstract painting. This socially charged series serves as both an homage to Art Brut and a bitterly ironic take on the cliché of “Russian Povera.” The same room also features a work by Andrey Volkov, whose majestic modulations of deep, richly nuanced blue evoke the velvet folds of ceremonial robes fashioned from sumptuous fabric. This meditative abstraction, resonating with the colourful, tightly wound “social theme,” serves as a propylaeum, a monumental gateway to the exhibition’s finale.

The exhibition’s final room becomes, after all, a kind of “storeroom of history”: a gallery of grotesque ceremonial portraits by Oleg Khvostov. The folds of the sitters’ robes, emblems of power, are echoed in the folds of their double chins. By exaggerating these physiological details, Khvostov offers an ironic take on the very genre of ceremonial portraiture.

The exhibition unfolds across two spaces at PA Gallery, with Anton Konyukhov’s total installation, No comments, forming an integral part of the project. His canvases, made from mirror-like material and folded using a technique developed by the artist, become literal reflections of reality. In the artist’s vision, this folded reality is pockmarked with small wounds, sores, and holes. Light plays a pivotal role in Konyukhov’s installation: the perforated surfaces of the folded canvases cast shadows that evoke an unsettling, camouflage-like pattern. Konyukhov’s work stands as the ultimate expression of the exhibition’s central motif. Spasmodic folds and draperies of reality: these associations imbue a seemingly neutral subject of academic study with unexpected intensity.