TODAYOLDS. Green Sun Automatic translate

The Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art presents the TODAYOLDS exhibition "Green Sun" — a fantasy universe where bananas, tacos, and scrambled eggs attack like monsters, and the absurd becomes a way to address the anxieties of the modern city dweller.

● A multi-layered visual world where humor coexists with existential fatigue ● A pseudo-California where characters trip on banana peels, overeat tacos, swear and speak in fictional slang – a detective story without a plot in which the viewer becomes an accomplice ● Supermarket shelves, soda machines, T-shirt prints, posters, logos and signs – a familiar urban environment taken to the point of grotesque

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in his essay "On Fairy-Stories" that it’s easy to invent a green sun; the difficult part is creating a world in which it would be natural. This famous quote has inspired millions of creators. Sasha TODAYOLDS has also created his own world.

This universe only pretends to be a California, like something out of cartoons and cop movies. In reality, God knows what’s going on here. The characters in the films guzzle shots of hot sauce, constantly step on banana peels, gorge themselves on tacos, and engage in mindless exhaustion through sports or golf. They wear T-shirts with meaningful slogans, but these are at odds with their slurred speech, peppered with curses. As in Tolkien’s worlds, there’s clearly a distinct artificial language here, somewhat reminiscent of the teenage slang in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.

The action of most of the works is immersed in a text-saturated space. But upon closer inspection, you realize it’s a city dweller’s environment: the colorful shelves of a grocery store, a diner lined with soda machines, a street where the building facades are hidden behind billboards. In this prosaic setting, infernal monkeys, and even the devil himself, appear every now and then, linking these paintings to the Mexican tradition of retablo folk painting.

Fried eggs, vegan burgers, bananas, and mustard literally suffocate the characters, filling the canvases and revealing the unhealthy fixation of contemporary artists on street food. The artist painstakingly imitates printed graphics — labels, packaging, advertisements, and clothing prints — and this obsessive visual cacophony reveals the melancholy of pop art, which pioneered the art of addressing the dreary burden of the consumer.

It’s easy to spot recurring characters in the works, but attempts to construct a linear narrative are doomed to failure, and even the alleged "murder" in one of the paintings doesn’t transform everything into a classic detective story. Art is always an investigation without a guaranteed solution, and the author’s stance, refusing to comment on his work, only emphasizes the viewer’s right to wander through this chaos and find their own path.

About the author

Sasha TODAYOLDS was born in 1999 in Astrakhan. He is a contemporary Russian artist and a representative of the independent art scene. He has no formal art training. His visual language is built on surreal nihilism, absurdity, and satirical metaphor. His works feature a variety of situational compositions, images, and characters, creating absurdist narratives and chaotic existential humor.

Sasha TODAYOLDS prefers not to comment on his works, leaving the visual narrative open-ended. He believes that authorial explanations distort the experience and narrow the viewer’s perception, distracting from the main point — the work itself.