COAL
The Ruarts Foundation presents a collective exhibition by the creative group 10.203, featuring Maxim Ima, Nikita Dusto, Turben, Ivan Ilinskii, Sergey Xeato and Sergey Krasavin. These ‘street wave’ artists organize exhibitions and projects in their own gallery-workshop in St. Petersburg, and at other venues.
When choosing an idea for collective exhibitions, 10.203 begins with one phenomenon, concept or material selected by participants of the group and revealed by each artist in their own way. The starting point for this project was coal, which the authors used primarily as an artistic tool, while focusing on the various associations that coal evokes as a material. Coal can simultaneously be both a product of combustion, symbolizing destruction, and a resource for creating something new. This duality gives rise to the main question of the project: can an object that is the result of destructive processes have a creative function?
For example ‘I Know, I Repent, I Apologize’, Maxim Ima’s series created specially for the exhibition, depicts willow branches, the material used to make charcoal for graphic art. The author examines the theme of rebirth: by drawing with carbonized willow sticks he seems to recreate the same plant on the sheet. Photographer Sergey Krasavin’s ‘Glimpse’ conveys the opposite in terms of emotion. The forest motif often recurs in the author’s oeuvre, and usually has a calming effect. But in this work the trees highlighted in black charcoal appear to have been burnt in a forest fire and are more likely to cause discomfort and anxiety. Burning a forest may clear the field for something new, but in ‘Glimpse’ the moment of rebirth has not yet arrived.
Included in the display are a central still-life installation, video art and graphic works created with charcoal. The sense of dialogue in this exhibition allows us to reconsider our own attitude to destruction, loss and trauma, and to find there the potential for healing, a source of inspiration and the stimulus to start anew.
