Wooson gallery presents Andrei Molodkin : post-utopian simulacrum, thefirst solo exhibition of the artist in Korea. Molodkin reproduces familiar imagerysymbols like the dollar or euro sign, the Statue of Liberty, Nike of Samothrace orspelling out frequently used words from FUCK to DEMOCRACY. The series of theseclear (as well as material and statement) plexiglas sculptures have been producedby a laborious process of inserting wax molds into an acrylic block and the waxeventually melted under the heat and pressure, leaving behind negative spacesand filled with unprocessed crude oil or blood. Molodkin's recent sculpture emphasison oil as the subject matter instead of using recognized symbols.
The exhibition we realized in Korea with the recent works of Molodkin were dedicatedto a very complex and sophisticated re-visiting of two important periodsof avant-garde art, the Russian Constructivism and the American Minimalism.Tosay more concretely, the utopian Suprematism of Kasimir Malevich as well as theAmerican Minimalism of the 60s with its puritan and reductive ideas of the immaterialform. Andrei Molodkin realized a subversive and provocative re-interpretationof these two basic avant-garde myths through the introduction of the "real"materials (petrol and gas) as metaphors of the "real" struggles for energy in our"post-utopian" world.
The pure - geometrical - abstract forms inherited from Suprematism and Minimalismwill be filled by two real, concrete materials: crude oil and gas, synonyms ofour epoch. Oil and gas light enter into an antagonistic relationship with each other,dependent on the oppositional other. The abstract form looses the pure utopiancharacter and became a sensual manifestation of tension, fight, ambiguity. Thequestion of our age is: who corrupts whom? Who manipulates whom? Who usesthe cultural metaphors, philosophic ideas, social symbols in order to control theenergy and power. Today oil belongs to, and is connected with, corruption; that isundeniable. Andrei Molodkin knows this and shows this, but there is a certain utopianismin his vision: through a subversive disclosure of the pseudo he reveals thecynical simulacrum. No longer naïve to such idealism as the Modernists, Molodkinshows contemporary reality, but in a way that illuminates it as fundamentally uglyand dishonest.
The beautiful utopia of the avant-garde is exposed as beautifully naïve; they trulythought they could create a new humanity through culture. Yet in the 21st century, utopian ideals are now very different; we no longer have the luxury of naivetyor innocence. Championed through the work of Andrei Molodkin, today we seekto reveal the unpalatable and destructive elements in order to show reality. Inthe brutal, contemporary reality of the post-utopian twenty-first century, AndreiMolodkin’s recent work reflects a re-materialization of the pure spiritual, universal,utopian Modernist abstract form by way of a complex socio-political facsimile.Through this re-contextualization, the well-known abstract forms from the GreatModernist epoch receive a tragically authentic significance, determined by both thereal struggles for power and the omnipotent simulacrum.
The exhibition in the Wooson Gallery presents installations and drawings concernedwith this subject. In a labor-intensive process and with great precision, theartist draws precisely with a simple ballpoint pen on his gigantic canvas drawings.Many times the pens are symbols of life itself, in the sense that the used-up pen(the dead) is immediately replaced by a new generation. Each of them is destinedto work obsessively at any price, until the last drop of ink-blood has been used,thus creating the illusion of a continuous, living process. For Molodkin, oil, ink andblood are all the same. Ink is the blood of a pen. Oil is the blood of Russia. Bloodwill one day be oil, which may be made into ink. For Molodkin, this is whatcapitalismis all about. Oil into art into profit.Molodkin believes that the oil industry is the flesh and blood of global economy andhe comments on how a national resource can become a national identity. Referenceto oil as the ‘global blood'.
Press release courtesy Wooson Gallery.