New art and photo project "Rhymes" by Ruslan Vashkevich

Rhyme is a consonance, an echo, phonetic but not semantic analogy between the words. Correlating and rhymed words harmonize the structure of poetic text. They are connected with each other, but not directly - in between "love" and "dove" or "again", "Elaine" and "ride the gravy train" each can create their own history. The variety of rhymes and possible links determines the enormous diversity.

 

 

In his new project Ruslan Vashkevich rhymes works of Old Masters with his own pieces, and his own artworks with their photo-analogies. Some viewers might want to challenge the artist with notion that "Rhymes" refers to the classical postmodernist method of (self-) quotation. However, in this project, artist's turning to photography and, in particular, creation of stage photo-versions of his own paintings and drawings, was grounded on not only and not just by the desire to replicate already created works in new "material", but was inspired by eagerness to look for new senses and ways of perception. First of all, while switching from painting to photography, Ruslan Vashkevich has been going through the inversion within the framework of the classical tradition. Instead of "painting from nature" (or when there is no "nature" available around - from a photo, which presumably captures this "nature"), which means reflecting Life that by default underlies Art; the artist objectifies and materializes a myth, "forcing" Life to copy Art. "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life's imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise that energy". The theory suggested by Oscar Wilde has been keenly embodied in Ruslan Vashkevich's recent project.

 

 
The images conceived in the artist's mind and transferred to the canvas, could forever remain the immaterial visual fantasies, which exist in the fictional world. Though these artistic images were lucky to find their life, having "incarnated" in concrete, living people. In addition to their flesh and blood, the Vashkevich's characters acquired the extra typical features of their "performers" - each character introduced into the composition his or her individuality and personal interpretation of the plot. The participants of the project were turned from models into actors; the artist himself became a producer, who controls and supervises the embodiment; and the photographs morphed into the freeze-frames from those not yet shot movies.

 

 

 

"We all are someone's rhymes and everything else is an external equivalence of our inner ideas, a match of intonations, a rhythm of warm-cold movements," notes Ruslan Vashkevich in regards to the project.