Motolyanets Semyon

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

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.

Motolyanets is faithful to soap. Having chosen soap as the theme and object of his artistic interest, he has succeeded in creating his own individual mythology. Soap is a constant metaphor, a nuclear mythologem, and also a material the artist works with. Just as for Joseph Beuys fat and wax were an independent, powerful textural element, and also a substitute, embodying the idea and meanings of “social plastics”, an ordinary piece of soap becomes a guide to the world of relevant meanings, manifesting itself as an indicator when launched into the right environment. Perhaps this is also a careful tactic, but it also has an element of irony (self-irony) and necessary critical distance.

But soap in itself is an object loaded with various meanings, which usually have a disappearing connotation. For example, the property of soap to slip through the hands gives it a certain similarity to judgments without a clear, fixed line – this is a performative material, which tries to escape and vanish along with water, expressing the flowing and changeability of states. The phenomenology of soap is such that it allows the artist to adjust his attitude, establishing the necessary discourses of judgments. In his new project, Motolyanets gathers together almost ten years’ experience of working with soap, utilizing diverse media he has tried over the past years: painting, photography, sculpture, objects, performance. Significantly, the first works in this cycle, canvases with depictions of piles of soap, were the artists’ response to the mass protests in Belarus two years ago. The political source of the works is not obvious. On the contrary, the towers of multicolored soap bars, in the style of “Richterian photo realism” are a triumph of the world of prosperity and consumerism, glamour and hedonism, and the hypertrophied scale reminds us of the success strategy in the promo images of pop art. The artist turns the aesthetic of “capitalist realism” against itself, working on its territory – and the silent opposition of stretched figures (lying and standing) refers to archaic forms of rituals, traces of which remains in primitive structures – dolmens. Rituals of purification? Stones worn away by time, wind and water, dolmens are synonymous with slivers of soap: the natural and the elemental rhyme with the human and social. There is something childish and infantile in building soap dolmens – a return to archetypical structures, asserting the presence of humans in the world.