The thistle, the frog and the oak wardrobe

The idea of the exhibition was born from the host space, the oak living room of the French Institute. Small and decorated with wooden panels, it reminded the artist of grandmother's wardrobe with polished doors, which stood in almost every apartment. Vadim often works with the theme of collective memory, so the surface of household items becomes a space of experiment. At the exhibition, Vadim expands the boundaries of his influence from individual objects to the whole space, giving it a new meaning and subordinating it to his vision.

The oak wardrobe, first of all, is a clothes wardrobe, so the exhibition presents clothes in the proper sense of the word. For those who have been familiar with Vadim's work for a long time, it is no secret that clothes, as a carrier of memory about a person, his preferences, and capabilities at a certain period of life, are often used by the artist as the basis for a new work. Often, things that are given to Vadim by friends serve this purpose, but he also uses objects that are familiar and understandable to everyone, such as a Soviet school uniform or a wedding dress. The women's dresses, the straitjacket, and children's sundresses presented at the exhibition differ from the previous "clothes" in their objectness. The new feature of the works is also enhanced expositionally: they are taken out from the wall plane and seem to exist in the real world – they hang in a closet, lie on a sofa, or are casually thrown over the back of a chair.

For many children, including the artist in childhood, the closet was a safe space where you could hide from both the "it" in hide-and-seek and the surrounding reality. The closet as a portal to another reality is often found in popular culture: Lucy finds a passage to Narnia in it, the Nutcracker leads Marie to the Candy Meadow, Boo finds himself in Monsters, Incorporated, and Draco Malfoy leads the Death Eaters to Hogwarts. At the exhibition, through an Oak Wardrobe, the viewer also seems to be looking into another reality – the one that Vadim has been creating for years. In it, various stories told by the artist harmoniously coexist: about the heroes of his own fictional pantheon, about toothy plant entities and insect companions, about a non-existent restless French monarch, about hasty gatherings, and about the Soviet legacy.

The reality hidden in the Oak Wardrobe is born as a result of the artist's understanding of the surrounding world and forms a kind of "inside" of his reality. On the horizon, Vadim will have to create the "inside out" of the Marais quarter of the fourth arrondissement of Paris as part of his participation in the residence "la Cité internationale des arts". The anticipation of a new stage of the creative path makes its way into the Oak Wardrobe with color accents, frogs, and heraldic lilies, which once served as the tops of the scepters of the French kings.

Kseniia Filippova

Joint project with the French Institute