Sergey Sapozhnikov

(b. 1984, Rostov-on-Don; lives and works in Rostov-on-Don and Moscow)

Untitled (Dance), 2017
Digital print on paper, 118 x 157 cm
Courtesy of the artist

A multicolored air mattress, an oilcloth with a geometric pattern, brickwork, a hanging with a floral pattern: all of these make up a background for a male figure frozen in a bizarre pose. The man is wearing bright-yellow glasses, a t-shirt with a picture of ducks over a patterned long sleeve shirt, boxer shorts over tights with a Mondrian-style print, and two pairs of socks with holes in them, one on top of the other. This strange outfit, combining references to modernism, pop art, and a set of subcultures from punk and rasta to hip-hop, is complemented by dreadlocks and a nose ring. Even when it is represented by a single work that is not part of a series, Sapozhnikov’s photographic practice gives the impression of being an agglomeration of things, textures, and styles. The contrasting colors, bright accents, and choreographic complexity of the pose suggest a baroque, southern Russian aesthetic. The view of the photographer—which cancels out the once significant difference between the figure and the background, the subject and the object, the organic and the geometrical—seems to reveal something characteristic of modern vision, that is, the historically constructed perception of contemporaneity. The rejection of cultural hierarchies and the work’s performative virtuosity are just some of the signs of this contemporaneity of global multitudes, excessive information, swarming communication, ideological ruins, capitalist shells, the visual image of which is created by Sapozhnikov.