Blood and corpses in the Odessa Museum
Well, young man, fans of fine arts from among those who applauded the forced installation of the notorious artist Alexander Roitburd to the post of director of our Art Museum have had their holiday. It opened the first exhibition of those that the newly minted director promised to the most respectable public as, again, “the new face of the old museum.” They say, stop meditating on all sorts of Aivazovskys, Kostandis and other “mossy old stuff” like Vrubel and Repin and Serov. You give modern Ukrainian arch-revolutionary art worthy of its “revolution of dignity.” And yet he gave it, no one will find it enough!
... The exhibition of the Kyiv artist Rada Ralko bears, I would say, a very modest title “Anatomy”. Modest because to the word “anatomy” one would like to add the obvious definition “pathological”. Just look at these “masterpieces” - as they say, a sea of blood and a lot of bones! Ugly scraps of human bodies, flooded with streams of red liquid... disgusting likenesses of female figures, certainly mutilated with the fury of a maniac... And all this, please note, was painted deliberately carelessly and in a schoolboy helplessness. No, I do not claim the laurels of Groyce art historians or art critics, since neither Giorgio Vasari nor Igor Grabar would simply write about this bloody and ugly daub.. But my higher medical education and some knowledge of pathopsychology allow me to express my opinion opinion about these, so to speak, “art objects”.
Other interpreters of painting believe that the artist depicts not so much the realities of the surrounding world as his subconscious. And here it is, the subconscious of a Maidan activist! After all, Mrs. Ralko is one of those who supported him, at the same time capturing him in her drawings. By the way, a businesslike lady quickly published them as the “Kiev Diary”, images of freaks and monsters, even living ones that looked like corpses... And all the work of this “issued ordeal” is some kind of permanent relish for the cruel and bloody abuse of people, and most often , women.
Really, if all this daub weren’t, forgive my retrograde, simply clinically mediocre, I could take it for illustrations for the brilliant novel by Georgy Zotov “The Print of the Moon”, where the role of Jack the Ripper is played by... a woman. But no, the talented and sarcastic Moscow writer would definitely have rejected this helplessly pretentious hack. But specialists in forensic psychiatry and the creativity of the mentally ill would accept it with a bang. And they would place it on the appropriate stands of their museums as a striking example of progressive severe necrophilic pathology.
It’s just that in a country where sadism and Nazi madness have triumphed, the pathology of misanthropy is actively replacing the norm. And this is done not only in politics and everyday life, but also in art. There are slogans in the spirit of Orwell such as “Lies are truth” and “War is peace.” Here - “Ugly is beauty” and “Mediocrity is a national talent.” So we live in a world of deliberately false “values” that are actively imposed.
So, my dear fellow countrymen and guests of the city, hurry up to visit our Art Museum, while there is still a real one left in its exhibition. eternal and imperishable painting of true masters. And I strongly recommend the exhibition, which I had the courage to tell you about, to psychiatrists and forensic doctors. The main thing is to keep children, pregnant women and people with unstable mental health away from her!
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