Motolyanets Semyon

“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

The project Luch Soap and Watch Factory, created by Semyon Motolyants specifically for the New Holland Pavilion, is an artist's reflection on the relationship between material and time. For more than ten years, soap has been the theme and material of creativity for Motolans. This time it appears in the form of seemingly fragile wooden pyramids. By assembling towers of soap bars in delicate shades and streamlined shapes, the artist raises questions about the transience of beauty and the importance of its contemplative component. The name of the project also refers to the Minsk Mechanical Watch Factory, which produced the Luch watch, an object from Semyon Motolyants' childhood, appealing to another category of time. At the same time, the ray is something intangible, just like the passage of time itself. 

It turned out that you can use soap to count down the time: a standard piece lasts for about 4 weeks. You get a candle clock, but instead of fire, water acts on it. Such watches are based on the principle of the disintegration of matter: the material of measurement gradually disappears from interaction with the world. However, all matter is subject to extinction in different ways. In the Soap Clock series (2018) I compared natural and ceramic soaps so that by 2024, the organic form began to disappear even without washing, just under the influence of a glance. And the ceramic remained practically untouched by time. For the Soap Towers series of works, exposure to the world and eye contact are equally important. Monumental pyramids of soap can only exist in a single moment of our gaze at them: the elusive nature of soap will immediately destroy the unstable shape. It is fixed only by the viewer's gaze. At the same time, for me, looking is not a way to see something, but, like Merleau-Ponty, a self-sufficient form of thinking. The gaze seems to envelop the pyramids, thinning their elements with invisible friction until they disappear, counting their time to the end - Semyon Motolyanets.

Ceramic soap pyramids are always about the countdown, an analog soap clock. A person always strives to count, count down time, intuitively feeling its extremity. Starting with a sundial, then an hourglass, man over the millennia came to a clock of almost cosmic precision. A second, a minute, an hour. The futility of trying to curb time can be seen in the soap clock — we count down the time with soaps, on average, a person uses 317 soap bars in a lifetime. This is how pyramids turn into clocks, in which the proportions of time are slippery and elusive. They remind us that we must appreciate the present and keep an eye on balance.

Semyon Motolyanets