Kyiv . Ya Gallery Art Center

Body-Mechanism

Mykyta Kravtsov

08.02.2012 – 07.03.2012

Mykyta Kravtsov

Ya Gallery art centre presents "Body-mechanism" project - study of carnality in the context of contemporary culture.

Exhibition Kyiv Ya Gallery Art Center

Ya Gallery art centre presents "Body-mechanism" project - study of carnality in the context of contemporary culture. The exhibition is divided into three thematic blocks. Series "Venus" tells about erasure any individuality in an attempt to be "somebody" and physical suffering associated withthis process. "Deer hunt," examines the same issue, but - from the perspective of the impact of external forces on the person. In the series "The complexity of relations," "dialogue" is completed, and rises question of the possibility of communication after all that've happened.

Oleksandr Lyapin about the project:

First impression - the artist operated not with brush and spatula, but with a shovel and an axe. He procured not images and generalizations, but traces of past and future crimes. The remains of gods and goddesses fell out from clayey layers. They fell apart, crept on the surface, like pieces of moist bread, and paled before the eye.
Fear and pain still live in these bodies. They ooze with yellow fluids, provoking gag reactions. Kravtsov is a criminalist. He explores the sufferings of the body. Death's way through the body. He is searching where the soul broke away. And if it escaped at all. Maybe, dead bodies are still alive?.. Maybe, the body exists not just as body, but as a wondrous substance that has prototypes in contact friends' list on Facebook or Vkontakte. Have you met all the users from your friends' list in person? Life without a body is nothing, and why don't they have such bodies?
Such flesh has a special buzz. Death gave birth to an endless quantity of new births in it. Maybe, the body was corroded by a mystical acid, having given it a flight into the stratosphere and then - down. So, having burnt down, it was mixed with dirt: they have all become victims to mad races for the prize of eternity. And it was a joke. No one got to the finish line. Everyone died.

The body is material and it carries a certain construct in itself: its materiality is reflected in the energy that forms it. Had the particle of the body been attached to the canvas long gone? There are multiple colors between black and white, and bodies, dug up by Kravtsov, settle in this very dirty-gray-brown-yellow unnamed divide.
Spectator, press your warm cheek, damp from the frost, to the body spread on the canvas, rub against Paleolithic Venus's rough stomach, listen to the ancient spells heard from the future. Admire the beauty of the bodies that became one with the earth.

Runs a noble wounded stag, symbol of the rising sun, the unreachable dream. It is running away from the live corpses, possessing elitist artistic taste, desperate to live, falling apart, not having achieved anything. The stag escapes, dropping blood. Corpses of loser dreamers turn to dust, torn space swallows them and consumes with appetite. Dark is covering the eyes. We must lie down to sleep on the couch next to the painting to see heavy prophetic dreams. This sermon of the endless useless in colors and canvases starts to kill little by little. Kravtsov knows something, but doesn't dare to write it in three words on the wall.

A Dream on a Bench in Ya Gallery in front of the Paintings by Nikita Kravtsov:
"I paint one body green, another blue. They copulate strangely through a pulsating hose 80 meters, 63 centimeters and 3,5 millimeters in length. And I must paint them quickly, because the forests begin to come off, and I am alone with a brush 600 above the ground... Endless flow of running elks is below. A dismembered body was lying in the grass, but it wasn't noticed, it was smoked, eaten, drunk... The bodies were silently surrounding us and their rotting parts were glowing. It was night, but eyes were blinded with bright light. No heads, no limbs. Only stomachs. Stomach is what dies last. Because it is the biggest". Opening your eyes, you see two
male torsos with a huge cock that threaten your life for no reason. Because it's time. There are moments in life when with a great force you feel that you are sleeping, that there is no you, but only a race with death. The race has done its job, I am dying in my sleep again.

Kravtsov told us again that however we speed, the loss is inevitable...

The painter interprets the myth, mixing it with criminalistics, and provides another reading of relentless time. Time is death, of course. Body is a clock mechanism that is impossible to be fixed and made go in reverse. Every particle of time something dies in the body. Kravtsov draws this something roughly. He runs over his characters as if with a truck turning them into flat cutouts. If we talk about meaning, then only by means of constructing death's creations.
Death is greedy. Its appetite and culinary preferences are drawn by the artist roughly and accurately. Women are more preferable for death. Kravtsov brings them on a platter, aesthetically presenting bodies to their best effect, overdoing the forms and providing dynamics. Death especially juicily bites into this stiffened juice with a fury of a sexual predator. With men, death only takes a bite, sucks and throws away. Their bodies are like sails at the "Flying Dutchman" in a quiet weather.
Race with death deprived the body of the sexuality. The body is not filled with erotica any more. The body turned into a lawn for carrot seeds... We are witnessing the products of aggression, murder results, traces of the race with the death. Bodies are the track, left by the cart of the death.
Body is moments of happiness, spent together, but then everything turns into habit. Don't worry about the body. It will come itself.


Author

Mykyta Kravtsov was born in Yalta in 1988. Lives and works in Kyiv.

In 2010 graduated from the National Academy of Fine Art and Architecture.

He currently continues his studies in assistantship.

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