PROVMYZA. PROVMYZA GERUND

Shadows of the invisible

With the burst open sky in the mouth

Many dying remembers the day

At a green table

with pink ham

in cool plates

the day ends with a sigh.

Thomas Bernhard. September 15, 1957

For the first time in such an exhibition, resembling a liturgical organization of works, "Provmyza" in a certain way represents what artists do or what they "serve" – disappearance, flushing, erasure, utopia. Speaking about the state of purity, which is equivalent to the volatility of being, "Provmyza" goes beyond the limits of a possible new world and proposes to consider the reality in which the metaphysical image is transformed into the thinghood of the earth. The exposition is founded on the principle of a temple composition, but there is no altar. Rather, the principle of the ultimate density of flesh is relevant, in which its scrupulous decomposition and destruction occurs. Just as the "Oratorium SARXSOMA" begins with waving an improvised "thurible" (a ball of dog and horse ammunition) and "throwing it away", disavowing it, so the time of a man falling from a mountain passes from a medieval body constructor to the viscosity and amorphousness of flesh. The artists seem to abandon the sequence, "shouting out" interjections-dances. Dance macabre, in which an open-minded, twitchy plastique is similar to both convulsion and movement in a mystical Moorish dance. In this dance, six men center around a woman clutching a ring. These men create a bizarre acrobatic sketch, reaching a frenzy in movement, just to please and/or become an object of lust.

This trickle-spreading, molecular bond and decomposition again, takes shape in a paradoxical afterlife dark structure, where the dog is not Cerberus at all, but part of an imperfect nature in which integrity is violated. The dog barking at an imaginary foe and attempting to scale a completely vertical wall is no longer an allegory but an obvious shifted mass of space where any aesthetic allusion encounters the impossibility of interpretation. However, I dare to assume that such a statement rather relies on a cacophonic reading, on the impact of an empty image, on the superiority of a line, or the vulnerability of a geometric shape. Like Merleau-Ponty in his concept of corporeality, expressed also in the experience of ambiguity. When two human hands touch each other, when the inseparable overlay of "outside" and "inside" sensations transforms the subject and object blur together, and then becomes a picturesque, or figurative, motional equivalent in its unagitated, vigilant, but not in a tense state embodied in an even more subjective space-filling reality. At the same time, there are unconditional allusions to the almost literal retelling of Thomas Bernhardt's poem "Decomposition"

If it weren't for those nights, I'd be dead,

and they raised a howl in me,

the brain is drowning in crying, and the bones are rumbling,

seeing off the ugly year, the hand is shaking,

the grass is faded, the towers is cleaving

the belly of heaven, the ice is cracking on the rivers

and the utopia of the new melancholy of Philippe Grandrieux's films, and even the current structures of Maria Lassnig's paintings, which remain highlights of a potential dialogue between space and time. Although the works of "Provmyza" are always in the field of interpretation of death and life, they insist on the utopia of transformation, being in permanent disappointment of blurred reality with the ultimate focus and expressing the cracking of the world as a kind of fragility.

A broken horizon, as in "Eternity", a reversed sky, a deception of vision, an illusion, a mirage, and at the same time the crying of a little girl, like stereo sound, an image gap, an attempt to avoid any interpretation other than the slow rhythm of a melancholic elegy, the agonistic dance of nature and a machine, a "disappointed" technological mechanism or hysteria, or the joy of a child. The "Juvenile Sea" embodies the shadow of the invisible, the idealisation of the world and its overthrow, the tautology of the chimera — the components of the works of "Provmyza" on a kind of retrospective statement. The "Juvenile Sea" a graphic canvas where, without referencing to the narrative and metaphysical component, the buried sea according to Andrey Platonov, one can also notice the image-cast of an unidentified land, or its similarity and negation. The disturbed earth, as a prototype of both the priest and the victim. The archetype in which the line, its potential fragmentation, the blurring of the horizon, the game of landscape, and the prophecy of myth that makes us imagine as an ideal another world, the existence of which is the suppression of the current one converge. Death is disappearance as the mythological punctum of the performative space in which the refraction originally took place. Death gives out one of the positions related to the duplication of the reproduced situation in a melancholic "Pitter-Patter", where the subjectivity of representation is subject to diffusion. Diffusion as the principle of flowing, bubbling, boiling from the Earth’s interior, but at the same time reflecting the passion, the pulse of the human body, limited by the chronotope of life, and transformed into the "blurred" girlish flesh. Her body is literally agitated. Before turning into nothing, it becomes water, frozen for a moment in its fragmented departed passion. Now it is born in the incarnation of water, transformed into steam, in the likeness of drizzle or dew, frozen sea or fog, also absorbed by the earth. In this magical coitus of the earth and the abandoned water, both life and death are expressed, as in the bursting of the waters at birth and at extinction. The visual principle that reflects existence as destruction, the blunted light, sometimes completely obscured by bodies, which becomes a reflective effect of the agonistic structure of the narrative. Everything here is subjected to a turgid destruction, the scrupulous abandonment of the remains of being. Graphicity, fragility, and the nature of the line's action, imitating, or rather extremely conveying the melancholy of grief, are features of the artists' drawings. The effect of Klinger's narrative, which is almost irreproducible in domestic art, where reality is turned into a cumbersome and tedious decoration. It must be considered. It is necessary to see either a face or a bent monk on one, and betray your own imagination. Striving exclusively to erase and freeze out the utopian world, in which the molecule of reality has spread into a sea of oblivion of grammatical construction and the absence of a word. The ochre or earthy graphics of the "Provmyza" are formed here through the process of image preparation – through boiling water, that is, evaporation, the conscious destruction of its properties, resulting in the death of both the material and the image. And at the same time, the allusion to interaction with the earth, the attempt to suggest a landscape, to discover the horizon line hides the meaning of the eternal whirlpool, the never-ending pulse in which nature proves its superiority.

January 2025

Karina Karaeva

Photo: Ivan Sorokin