Olga Chernysheva. Representation

The art of Olga Chernysheva is, in the highest sense, unostentatious. It is designed for prolonged contemplation rather than as a dazzling spectacle. Hence the title of her exhibition at the MYTH Gallery — "Representation" — promises a non-trivial interpretation of the theatrical theme. We see two types of images: in one hall, paintings concerning the spectators; in the other, those concerning the performers upon the stage.

Chernysheva does not often paint or draw portraits, but she frequently depicts people encountered by chance and captured in some unifying motion, for example, on underground escalators. The people in her world are creatures of a single kind – or, more precisely, of a single swarm. This view of human society from somewhere above, as if God were surveying his creation or a cinematographer were shooting a scene from a camera rig, is here a sight familiar to everyone: it is the view of the stalls of a sumptuous theatre auditorium as seen from the gallery. Whilst awaiting the performance to begin, and even whilst it is underway, the spectators in the stalls – not all of them, but many – are engrossed in their devices. This is a familiar picture of the 'dual' society of the theatre. The artist captures the effect of the lighting: those gazing into their phones are suffused with a blue radiance; they seem to exist in a different realm from their neighbours, who merely look upon the stage.

Upon the stage in the gallery's other hall, we see a musical performance: radiant choirs are singing, against which the attire of the choir's directress and the choirmaster's tailcoat stand out like a raven-black note-hieroglyph. The sound, which seemingly cannot be conveyed in painting, we perceive through the undulating dynamics of light, floating tones, through a shifting, hazy aura that unites the singers into a veritable otherness, a creative choral utopia of space and time.

So, we are faced with two forms of otherness: the technogenic and the musically harmonious; two forms of unifying swarm-like orders; and two historical prototypes of these images, in which painting embodies a myriad of faces. The ancestors of the singers are, in fact, the angelic choirs of medieval Catholic painting: the 'typical' little faces of singers amidst a throng of golden wings. The forebears of the audience in the theatre auditorium are much closer to our own time: they are the first spectators of the era of mass culture, depicted with swift strokes by those great draughtsmen Honoré Daumier and Gustave Doré. And another painting comes to mind, from whose appearance Mikhail Yuryevich German dated the epoch of modernism – James Ensor's "The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889." Spectators glued to their phones risk missing this event if it were to take place offline, but they will certainly be notified online.

The exhibition created by Chernysheva awakens in the viewer a contemplative spirit and a love of meditative reflection. Twentieth-century art reveals precisely this meditative way of perceiving painting within a white, empty space. Emptiness – the volume of air between the auditorium and the stage, 'charged' with creative energy – is one of the central themes of "Representation." Here lies the contrast between these pictorial arrangements: the regular formation of the backs of the audience's heads and the stalls – a theatrically ordered, immobile society; and the soaring, irrepressible imagery of the choirs. At the moment these two elements touch and converge, the invisible power of art comes into play – the force of liberation, of flight above the gallery, the ceiling and its painted heavens; the gift of redemption – from isolation through revelation, and from silence through the living voice.

Ekatherina Andreeva

Photo: Ivan Sorokin