RED AND BLACK. PART TWO. THE PROJECT OF NATALIA GEORGADZE

The number of meanings that humanity has endowed with red and black seems endless. The whole history of the twentieth century, its totalitarian regimes, its revolutions, its banners, are painted in these colors. Including the revolution in art, the symbol of which was Malevich’s Black Square. Black is darkness, dissolving all past experience, the point of zeroing, negation, ending a certain period. And red, opposite to black, is a challenge, an affirmation of the new, containing a call for its upholding and the battle for it.

However, these complex constructions are derived from the original, archaic, where red and black do not exist as part of the color spectrum, but as symbols of the psychophysical experience of a person in the world.

Here the dyad “red and black” acquires an erotic sound, because it is associated with moments of human life associated with maximum emotional stress: red is associated with love, battle, anxiety, victory, aggression. Black stands for darkness, dream, ending, death. Considering black and red as part of the universal red-white-black triad, the English anthropologist Victor Turner notes that these symbols of psychological and social experience are closely related to the physiology of the human body, as they relate to the colors of the body’s products. Mother’s milk corresponds to white, blood to red, and excrement, decay products, and conversion of organic to earth and ashes correspond to black. Thus, Turner writes, “the white-red-black color triad represents the archetype of man as a process of experiencing pleasure and pain.”

But even these values must be put out of the brackets, released, laying out the structure of the visual language in descending order and moving into the area of “aesthetic” - where the red spot is simply a red spot. Here, color is free from all reflection, and has the right to simply be, affirming only its own existence. The aesthetic dimension offers us red and black, not as carriers of the symbolic, but as an object of study of different tonality and strength of sound, the search for the maximum intensity of sensory tension. These two colors - the embodiment of the limits of the ability to feel - denote the extreme points of the amplitude of visual perception, stretching from complete “nothing”, the absence of light and the image of black, to the maximum intensity of red.

The polyphony of the exhibition shows the ability of color to embody all these roles and invites the viewer to explore various levels of the structure of the visual language - as a set of historical connotations, as a field of mental experiences and as a space of pure experience of sensory perception.

CHA, CRIMEAN SHAFT, 10, 5 HALL

Andrey Volkov

Valentina Apukhtina

Igor Shelkovsky

Klara Golitsyna

Konstantin Batynkov

Natalya Georgadze