An Initial Landscape Exhibition

The landscape begins in the realm of nature and continues in the realm of culture. It thus unites the heterogeneous, allowing natural energies to permeate the cultural world and cultural intuitions to plunge into the depths of nature. Before we can formulate this characterization, we notice that it is hopelessly flawed. As soon as it hits the eye of the artist, the landscape becomes a fact of culture, incorporated into the network of its complex inner connections and transformed by means of lines and colors into a new statement - then to process further the consciousness and, indeed, the vision of the viewers themselves. The emergence of the landscape in the world of culture is thus not without reason, but free from an extra-cultural beginning: nature has as much to do with its appearance in the cultural world as the goddess Metida had to do with the emergence of Athena from the head of Zeus.. Working with the essence of this "elementless landscape," the exhibition participants see it as a "flowing mass of cohesive particles constantly changing their volume, color, height, weight and form," to quote Mikhail Matyushin, and broaden their vision by learning to move in this flow and striving to move towards the original - not the phenomena of nature immersed in space and time, but the archetypes of culture removed from them, though relating to them covertly and non-obviously. The metaphysics of St. Petersburg, deliberate and elusive from perception, provoking us to fall into a "thin sleep" of contemplation of our flat landscape and constantly disrupting its inner coherence, contributes much to this kind of study. Other factors that have influenced the work of Alexei Smolovik and his colleagues-Vyacheslav Mikhailov, Vladimir Zagorov, Larisa Astrein and Mikhail Tserush, from the "synthesis of constancy and changeability" in the landscapes of Paul Cézanne to the "organic trend" in the Russian avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century-are quite obvious, though they can serve as little more than hints in perceiving the complex integrity of the exhibition.

Dmitry Spivak
D. in Philology, Head of UNESCO Chair in Comparative Studies of Spiritual Traditions, their Specific Cultures and Interreligious Dialogue, Likhachev Institute for Cultural and Natural Heritage, Moscow, Russia. D. Likhachev Institute for Cultural and Natural Heritage (Moscow, Russian Federation)


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