THOUGHTS
Roman Korzhov
Video paintings*
Video paintings from new series the Stabilization and the False Facade are portraits, landscapes and interiors which were shot by intuition in different ways – sometimes as posed images, sometimes by occasion like a try but later they have been viewed for a long time and interpreted. Estimated duration of subsequent work on each painting was included into the optics of choosing the “the nature” - imagination discovers the right color and texture and you have only to fix and “manifest” it. The need to shift the author’s point of view in this project opened up new opportunities and motivations, observation of a special “vibration” of places and “heroes” never met before as if something long forgotten is trying to remind of itself; visualization of the presence of something different that no one knows about yet but will definitely recognize upon seeing it. Or it is a movie trailer with forgotten name and plot but someone is about to remember what it was about.
As a consequence of this transformation, the new intonation visibility and the need for a new statement “accuracy” appeared although almost always the “accuracy” is made up of different, sometimes unrelated things but when everything “grows” together, for an unobvious case, at some point you understand the “rule” which, however, immediately disappears without a trace.
Previously found tone of “detachment” or “alienated observation” from previous series of video paintings, such as, Event Horizon (2009 – 2018) exhibited in the projects Poetry of Detachment and Under the Gaze of Another was expressed with the help of plasticity of non-places images, not demanded by attention being beyond the limits of “useful consumption”: the same landscapes or interiors as parts of physical space existing autonomously where there is no character as a subject of a specific story, ideology, politics etc. The main artistic technique is the endless repetition of video pieces in various order: moving shadows movement, trees, dust flight, pouring water etc; in every sense empty spaces filled with nothing and nobody, demonstrates artistic idea of “filling up” of gaps in the discreet perception of the modern world and with its help creates the effect of “waiting for events” – the feeling familiar to a viewer who is ready to become a witness of the event but not its creator.
This plastic solution connecting video fragments with music fragments in different ways gives the feeling of rise and fall of tension and also the feeling that everything was filmed in one shot but every frame is unique. Static camera demonstrates, on the one hand, the absence of the author’s view and movement – the video seems “to stupefy” and makes the viewer “stupefy”, they are like “two emptinesses” looking at each other; on the other hand, the camera, however, demonstrates a frame of the selected “world fragment”, a painting frame. In addition to this series there was created a series of video portraits, Observers, where every “observer” was looking not into lens but far beyond it, the portrait focus does not coincide with the surface of the video and with the viewer looking at it – the “portrait” does not see the viewer, it is an emptiness for it, there is no event and the “portrait” does not take part in it...
In the new project the idea of detached observation and filling up the gaps “grew” into understanding of the “gap” space as its own art space, agenda and histories. The project also continues discovering “significant” in insignificant, important in already (or in yet) unnecessary, strange in usual, helping to build its “own” new relations with the time that keeps “coming” dissolving everything inbuilt or unwritten into its movement, the changes happen non-stop – vaguely and steadily, repeating, contorting, developing, vanishing and appearing like clouds in the sky. All tried-and-tested visual techniques – fragmentation of video and sound, slowing down, speeding up and using playback reverse speed, multiple repetition of the fragments in a different order – are used in today’s series of video paintings.
Nevertheless, working with the color in paintings with the help of editing software, the techniques of easel painting were used — underpainting, texture, stroke and glazing etc., as far as possible avoiding movie tricks with color tables and composition solutions, thus, creating moving but “non-movie” image where the new technical capabilities – high resolution, wide color range and editing software – are used as the artistic idea transformed into new images of the modern world: “false facades” – vibrations between the desired and the actual; instrumental “stabilization” as an endlessly escaping possibility of order and balance.​
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*The text was first published in Nelya and Roman Korzhovs' exhibition catalogue for the exhibition Coauthors Don’t Conclude Agreements at New Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 2023.