"Shelter in the folds of the coat lining, collections of some year": Victoria Kosheleva
“Shelter in the folds of the coat lining, collections of some year” exhibition
Galerie Hors-Cadre is pleased to present the exhibition “Shelter in the folds of the coat lining, collections of some year” by painter Viktoria Kosheleva.
“This haggard crowd! It announces: We are the sad opacity of our future spectres!” Stéphane Mallarmé, Toast Funèbre, Nouvelle Revue française, 191
At the entrance to the grotto, the dimly-lit torches of the hallucinations still keep watch, and seem to cautiously invite the viewer to the unveiling of a revealed intimacy. The gaze is turned inwards. The trick is not just to get inside, but to take the necessary time: engage your breath and let yourself be totally sucked into Victoria Kosheleva's mythological current.
In the foliage of her subconscious, fantasies and memories overlap. Characters wander in this jar of entrails like inconsistent yet insistent beings... The artist invokes the philosophical concept of Hantology thought up by Jacques Derrida and then Mark Fisher. We have to see it as a new field of experience, where we have to accept the possibility that the dead come back and haunt our present. From then on, we must no longer think of life as full presence, but as a presence that is undermined by absence.
A myriad of temporalities is diluted throughout the exhibition. The constructed visions of the paintings dialogue with the fleeting apparitions of the watercolors. Here, they are fragments, recurring characters who will later inhabit the mental landscapes painted on the canvases.In love with sensual expressionism, the artist unleashes her gestures and sets monsters free.Colorful spectres emerge from the past, crossing temporal bridges: acid colors such as the green and violet used in the 70s colonize the present.
Titles, like seeds of truth, are offered to guide the senses.
Sheltered in the folds of the world, they open up parallel spaces, “safe places” as the artist puts it.“Memories form threads weaving their own cocoons.The concept of safe place is the search for a safe place in the folds of history for events and characters taken out of context.It's an escape into which I take the viewer (...). There are several layers to my work: emotion, color and then revelation, the deeper composition: heroes and archetypes.The act of creation is a place where I can be myself and continue to live; it's the real space where I can meet myself.”This tête-à-tête with herself, juggling contemporary screens and resurgences of the past, is also ultimately a mirror of the times.The works crystallize her fantasies and fears, and gradually become amulets charged with her essence.
In today's context of crisis, the search for the inner self and the call to spectres are both essential and salvific: they repair ills and transform beings.
They enable us to re-enchant the world and open our hearts to the ineffable.
The artist's plastic expression, as historian
Jean Clair reminded us when speaking of symbolism, is “a kind of ersatz religion, a cult of aestheticism charged with spirituality”, a necessity for the soul.
Elise Roche
* Shelter in the folds of a coat lining, collections from a certain year.
