The exhibition has an age limit of 18+.
This time, the gallery will open its anniversary year with a project by Dmitry Gretsky and Evgenia Katz in the main space at Marina Gisich Gallery. A creative couple of St. Petersburg artists lives and works in Toronto. They are among the few authors who have managed not only to combine academic training with relevant topics and subjects, but also to demonstrate that an academic painter is able to think like a modern artist.
The exhibition will include large-scale curtains, giant steel trellises resembling flickering screens, delineating the boundaries between the visible and the disappearing, the ephemeral and the material. A metal mesh holds translucent graphite drawings on fragile, transparent paper teetering on the verge of disintegration. The gaps, painstakingly glued together, become a reminder of the inexorability of entropy, turning the recovery process into a mantra. The background, the void— becomes the central element that permeates the installations of the two spaces of the project. Clownish narratives played out on large graphic sheets combine drama and absurdity, unfolding on the deck of a motorboat locked in the garage of a private house. The characters of Cargo Tales, trying to cope with a sense of uncertainty, practice rituals in anticipation of a miracle, hoping to resolve the moral dilemma and overcome the drama of emptiness.
Text for the exhibition by Anastasia Kotyleva:
The practice of artists Dmitry Gretsky and Evgenia Katz over the years has been associated with the disclosure of the properties and possibilities of "pencil" drawing. Usually, working with graphite on a piece of paper, whether it's "hand training" as part of a regular academic production, a quick virtuoso sketch, or a sketch for a work, is associated with preparatory or intermediate activities. Gretsky and Katz seem to be shifting their relationship with this technique in two directions at once. For them, a drawing made not with a simple pencil, but with thick, very soft graphite, acquires a fundamental role: it can become a self-confident work, or, for example, turn into the first layer, from which a three-dimensional graphic object grows. But the mode of drawing as a constant "preliminary" work also turns out to be productive for the two co-authors. Artists repeatedly find new techniques within their own practice, so that each work or project seems to push the appearance of the following works. This development resembles the logic of building TV series. The exhibition "Cargo Tale" can be seen as several episodes of the serial story of Gretsky and Katz, combining several plots. The first develops from small outlined sheets that grow into multi-meter "Curtains", the pattern is complemented by layers of metal mesh, the strokes or traces of their erasure grow into space with plastic clamps, black or white. The next reversal is a return from abstraction to figurative drawing, but already modified by the experience of creating images that cannot be considered. Another plot is devoted to the game of involving and pushing the viewer. The third one talks about the tenderness and benefits of Canadian garages for art.
The subjects listed and unspoken stitch together the two rooms of the exhibition, which are compositionally opposed to each other. "Curtains" are the main characters of the first hall. The name of the works indicates the functions – to hold, to separate what is available and everything else, to hide. The large-sized facilities of Gretsky and Katz could indeed become a physical barrier, blocking the entrance or exit. But safely placed along the walls, they remain graphic works that perform all these operations only with the viewer's gaze. The works are made and shown in such a way that they are difficult to inspect and quickly get a complete impression. The large size of these objects, the layered structure assembled from different materials, the simultaneous presentation of themselves as a graphic plane and a three-dimensional thing, all this complexity turns them into an obstacle to vision and a trap for gaze.
According to the artists, the most important detail of the work is the small traces of the "darning" of the first layer. The drawing that becomes the basis of each "Curtain" is made with graphite on thin cotton paper. During the intensive drawing of lines, the material is constantly torn, and the authors carefully restore the sheet by gluing it with small stripes on the back. If you overcome the resistance of all layers and get to the core with your eyes, you can find these traces, but you should be prepared for the work to "capture" or look at you in return.
The barrier hall precedes or protects the entrance to the secret fishing area. Here, with the help of figurative graphics, the artists represent two characters engaged in selfless waste of time. Sitting on the deck of a motorboat, they try to sunbathe naked, cast a fishing rod, swing oars or invent other forms of leisure, but all their actions take place in an enclosed garage and look staged. A novel about confidential intimacy, sealed by rituals of deliberately ridiculous posing for each other, can also be read as an allegorical story about escape from reality, or as a reference book collecting information about various forms of displaced activity of people in a stressful situation. The obvious intimacy of the series is enhanced by the similarity of the characters to the authors, or rather, the artists use themselves as models.
The plots shown in the drawings take place in a space hidden from prying eyes. But this secret life of the characters is constructed in graphic works that the authors initially plan to show to the public. The game of presented and hidden, which works in the "Curtains", is inverted here. The authors bring the hidden to the surface, but by building hatching, it becomes almost impossible to penetrate deep into this rattling space, the eye is caught again, but now in an effort to assemble a complete image.
Both the "Curtains" and the garage scenes are images associated with living in exhausting modernity. In addition to visual metaphors indicating the relationship between private and public, blocked and accessible, as well as other relevant dispositions, artists organize a space that forces the viewer to focus on their own vision, to discover that it requires constant effort. Such eye training does not imply any obvious result, the image will not clear up to the end, no matter how much you look at it, the curtain will continue to hide what exists behind it. There is no point of view where "everything will fall into place" here. The period that is being lived now will one day be described as an era of change, it seems quite indisputable, but within this process it is difficult to clarify a person's own experience of "his time". Dmitry Gretsky and Evgenia Katz, like many authors, try to discover themselves in what is happening through artistic practice, but they present to the audience rather than the results of this work, but rather the opportunity to practice in finding the necessary distance, useful for the future.
