Those

Exhibition of photographs by Elena Zichon

January 17 - March 19, 2006
The Enfilade of the Main Building

BETWEEN THE STATUES:

by Lisa Plavinskaya.

Elena Zichon photographs various things. Her landscapes, interiors, rare still lifes and portraits - even if the model stares straight into your eyes - are always on some different matter. Her gaze has this distinct lack of focus, like in front of the screen at the cinema. It feels like the camera slides, or perhaps the sound was lost, so we cannot hear what the actor is saying. It's obvious - the suspense grows, but as the music can't be heard, it is somehow less frightening. It's not as if there were no feelings, emotions or passions in her photo documented world; they are there, but behind the scenes, or just further into the plot, or perhaps, in the previous episode. The actual "Now" does not surface in her pictures. With the only exception.

Statues. Elena Zichon photographs them often. The statue appears in the frame as a side screen - the picture is taken from the back. Or as a curtain - as if the figure had blocked the most important things. In the end the statue itself becomes an object; but fragmented and at a strange angle, not geometrically official, but somehow distorted and personal. The composition is based neither on symmetry nor horizon, but on body parts: a leg, a shoulder, or, moreover, emotion. She traces even the statues' own glances.

Elena Zichon belongs to the tired generation of these born at the dawn of the Soviet empire. The generation of the end of the century and the end of the millennia, which bears a much heavier burden of memories. It should have been hard for her. But she runs as far away as possible, and relays the inevitable to the statues. She denies the careless immobility itself, denies the bliss of the endless dream, and the golden paradise of the dead academic antiquity. Just as the ancient Greeks, she gives the statues the eyes of a clever, proud and delicate, living human. The Statues become subjects with real life. They tell us with their fine marble tongues of our, her "Now", not of their divine and frozen "Once", and warm our hearts returning us to the our intellectual home - the European Classicistic air.

Now everything falls in place. The way of thinking becomes a meditation, and the clarity of the real life, unspoiled by events, crystallizes in safety somewhere out of the frame.

Russian version

Skulpturen mit Spezialeffekten. Moskauer Deutsche Zeitung 19.01.2006

Twice More Motionless. Anna Ozar. The Moscow News, ? 3 25.01.2006