Andrey Volkov, Adil Aubekerov, Anna Kazmina, Alisa Gorelova, Andrey Syaylev

Exhibition Function. Affect is, in the language of film franchises, a spin-off of last year’s Function exhibition, dedicated to reflections on the functional side of art. The focus is even more specific this time — affect. Affect is about color, shape, media, and execution or, in other words, the means that contemporary artists employ in order to capture a fleeting impression and make it work inside a painting.

The choice of red and shades of red as the exhibition’s keynote color scheme is anything but accidental. In European culture, including Slavic, red was considered the main color. Aristotle put it in the center of his order of colors, and Goethe maintained that the color red “includes all the other colors”. Red thus represents the appearance of color as such. It can warm and envelop you, and if you add a little sunny yellow you get the color orange, just as in Andrei Volkov’s canvas, which itself appears to fill the entire exhibition space with warmth. “A warm red color, when strengthened by its kindred yellow, produces orange. By virtue of this admixture, the inner movement of the color red begins to progress towards radiation, emission into the ambience,” wrote Wassily Kandinsky. In his paintings, Volkov works with the paints to elicit all properties that heighten the perception of color. As a follower of the principles of radical painting, he does not so much convey impressions but rather literally creates them.

The color red is life itself. It flows through our veins, keeping us alive, but when it breaks out it frightens us with the possibility of death. Red is about life that’s larger than us. This flow of vital energy is well captured by Adil Aubekerov. His white line disperses across a perfectly red canvas like a thread of fate from Greek mythology, stretching through our life, weaving fanciful images as it intersects with other people’s fates.

Red is a symbol of passion, having within itself love and creation on the one hand and aggression and destruction on the other. It makes the color red the very epitome of the fickle, unconscious nature of affect. Such a dichotomy fills the works of Alisa Gorelova, where human bodies are intertwined, enticing the viewer into an ecstatic action of dramatic affects.

Anna Kazmina deals with affect as the cyclical force of creation and destruction, laying emphasis on the creative process. She destroys factory-made porcelain tableware only to recreate it anew. Thus the former kitschy items are born again, remaining recognizable yet bearing the marks of the artist’s creative intervention, inevitable evidence of a different life for these items. In the end, the object gets caught at the borderline between two worlds, forever encapsulating the potentiality of both life and death.

Affect is captured in a special way in the presented work by Andrei Syailev from the Pseudomorphoses series. Pseudomorphosis is a mineral aggregate that is in a form unusual for it, existing as a result of the replacement of one mineral with another. Andrey Syailev, through various chemical reactions and combining various materials, repeats this long process in a short time. The material does not go through gradual replacement, but through affect acquires new properties almost instantly. The final work is actually a frozen affect, which is emphasized by the shape of the balaclava, a mask with the constant expression of an absent human face.