Dates: November 18 - January 20 (Tuesday - Sunday, from 13:00 to 21:00) Address: Usacheva str., 9
Sometimes there is a feeling that the familiar world has transformed into a utopian reality in the spirit of the survival game, the Battle Royale genre so popular today ("The Hunger Games", "The Game of Liars", "The Squid Game", etc.). At the same time, its rules are "Run" or "Freeze", similar to those which we were once guided by, having fun on the playground, have become the constant of our entire existence.
The exhibition "Freeze" in the K35 gallery is the first personal project in Moscow of the prominent Krasnodar artist Tengiz Shamov. Its name literally refers to the children's game "The Sea is agitated", in order to win in which it is necessary to take a static pose and not move during the time set by the presenter. This allusion to the rules of the game becomes for the artist the basis for thinking about the protective mechanism of our psyche - slowing down, which occurs under the influence of various external factors. It is reflected not only in the subjects that the painter takes as a basis, but also in their interpretation. All the scenes in Tengiz's works resemble cut-out frames of an arthouse film. The heroes of his large-scale paintings, snatched from the intense rhythm of life, seem to hang in the air and freeze on a dark background. The viewer can only intuitively guess what happened "before" and what will happen "after". This effect contributes to cognitive distortion of perception of reality. Thanks to him, the artist manages to grasp the general sense of time, when a sharp change in life circumstances gives rise to a feeling of the disappearance of the soil from under his feet. A person finds himself in a non-standard situation in which the brain focuses its attention on a new introductory, temporarily ceasing to feel the context. At this moment, it seems that everything around is quieting down. We freeze. Slowing down. We concentrate on the smallest details. We listen to the silence. We turn to the deep "self". The rest seems to cease to make sense. For a while. Subsequently, the acquired experience of the strongest shock continues to live inside us in the form of a gloomy memory, which we have been trying to comprehend for a long time. It is this moment of the general process of "fading" that unites all the presented works of Tengiz Shamov, which offer a wide arena for reflection, correlating with the present reality.