PAINTING. "BIG PAINTINGS SOLVE BIG QUESTIONS" SERIES. 2015-2018.

The art of Semyon Motolyanets is a conflict. A conflict between the artist’s reflexes and his ratio (“reason”). With a traditional fine arts education behind him, the painter is not able to control himself. He feels the first impulse to create something and unintentionally paints in the way he was taught. The next moment is an involuntary reaction to how it turned out: “God, what a vulgar sunset I’ve made!” The texts are the artist’s voice of reason, encumbered with postmodernist consciousness. What was beautiful in Kant has turned trivial. Traditional painting is not comme il faut.

The irony on the subject of generally accepted and well-established rules of the game in the capitalistic art world – big paintings solve big problems – looks like a form of protection, of self-identification and to some extent even resistance to evil, but it is also the pursuit of truth, lost in a vast field of illusions”.

Lizaveta Matveeva

OBJECTS. SERIES "PYRAMIDS". 2024.

The works form a new series of works where soap is not used as a readymade, but is taken as an image, and its practical meaning is replaced by a metaphorical one. Shaky unstable pyramids made of glossy ceramic soap are an alternative to porcelain elephants standing on a chest of drawers in some bourgeois apartment. Small plaques on the base suddenly introduce the discourse of time: Another 20 minutes, Constancy lasts five hours, Another 328 years, and the work becomes an absurdist measure of either lost or remaining time.


Elizaveta Matveeva