Belyi Peter

Installation RETURN TO PAINTING.

Self-reflection, art about art, is an enduring genre. Its ontological features, as well as one's desire to understand what it means, is an endless conversation.

From the very beginning, the author's conception, an attempt to describe a story about a cloud of images, a cloud of time, failed miserably. The idea of a detailed personal narrative generally contradicted the general line of the artist, who preferred a laconic and detached language. In the end, this was also the case this time - the exposition, or rather its absence, is somewhat reminiscent of Sorokin's story Horse Soup, where the imaginary food became gradually more real for the protagonist than the real thing.

The appeal to classical art, a fractured rod or spine, is present as a deconstruction of the universal religious subject (concrete glow), and the empty frames on the wall, like ghosts of the past, stare at the viewer with blind eyes - partly asking if he sees in them the disappeared subjects. Such a game, art has outgrown the frame, is not a new theme (the paintings will be brought tomorrow), but an important one. Where has art escaped to and when will it return to where it should be?

The modern viewer is ready to meet art anywhere, so the artist's return to tradition is a logical step. The right turn, the return to the painting, as if making a modernist somersault, makes this exhibition a jubilee in meaning. The state of the author, who has moved away from youthful experimentation and returned to the classics, is perhaps the only biographical moment preserved.

Peter Bely's Pinocchio Library project is dedicated to modeling the past. Usually, the genre of modeling is related to the future. It is no coincidence that it was popular in the 1920s, during the time of utopian hopes, when artists not only created models of future cities, but also perceived paintings as indications of possible technical projects. Pyotr Bely's Memorial modeling is aimed not at the future, but at the past, illustrating the eternal formula of humanity — hope for the future and disappointment with the past. Modeling, which is associated with the idea of future progress, is turned back by Peter Bely, mainly in the 1960s and 70s, a time when one of the last utopian impulses of our era was being experienced. The hero of the project, a wooden Pinocchio doll, embodies the figure of an architect obsessed with wonderful ideas with which he hoped to remake the world. And at the same time, Pinocchio the Sixties still lives on in each of us. This is an insoluble residue of utopian ideology, once embodied in the faceless construction of the 1960s and 70s, the inevitability of the projective nature of life, which gives modernity an extraordinary fragility. Pinocchio's library is made of wood, like the hero himself, its books cannot be opened, partly it declares disappointment in knowledge as such, partly it seems like a tombstone to unnecessary knowledge. The Pinocchio Library is a memorial to utopia, which in itself is always already a memorial. When utopia is experienced, it does not seem so to its contemporaries, but is realized as utopia only after the fact. Nevertheless, Pinocchio's Library is filled with renewed hopes, and above all, that one day the wooden doll will turn into a real boy. This transformed Pinocchio lives on architectural ruins embodying social utopias.