From the project Such a Moment
0331с

0331с works with graffiti and develops «rough» image-making techniques such as burning, smoking, and carving in stone. He also engages with studio practices including sculpture, drawing, and photography.

The works from the project Such a Moment were specially created for Garage inside the Museum building. Performers in protective suits, including the artist, stood in front of a blank sheet of paper. Two fire extinguishers mounted on a moving platform travelled rapidly along the eleven-meter work, spraying acrylic enamel primer. It fixed the contours of the figures, turning the people into reverse stencils.

The artist transferred the fire-extinguisher graffiti technique, which he was one of the first to explore in Russia, from the street context into the institutional space. Paradoxically, 0331с’s works on city walls, which risk being painted over by municipal services, are in fact more fragile than works on paper shown in a museum setting. This raises the question of how (and which) gestures and statements are preserved and disappear.

The artist is interested in group compositions: he arbitrarily chose examples from art history —ancient scenes on vases from the 8th—6th centuries BCE and Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830). Such a Moment ironically points to the closeness of different visual cultures through the specific conditions of its creation, the conventionality of repetition, and the discursive marker in its title. Propelled under pressure, the paint reproduced familiar images but captured the intense experience of the present moment, as revealed in the voids left where the bodies of the anonymous performers had been.