Dmitry Shorin
The reality of art constantly gains new layers, shifting from metaphysics to the culture of mass communication and its images. Dmitry Shorin's visual system easily follows this vector while succeeding in preserving the purity of its own language and, at the same time, applying relevant up-to-date strategies. Its structure is perfectly democratic and recognizable. It involves “street” photography, characters and figures from billboards, the second-layer reality” of glossy magazine covers. D.Shorin's vision based on foreshortening is drawn towards peripheral zones, similar to the workings of a dragonfly's compound eyes. His vision breaks 2D screen flatness in the same manner as does the eye of a witness in Quentin Tarantino's films, bursting into the sudden insight of a Zen koan.
The artist's vision brings the surrounding world right up to our eyes, zooming in on events, living through its mise-en-sce?nes, making us feel its energy and cogency. The girls in Dmitry Shorin's projects shimmer in the gaps between ready-made mass culture and the actual reality of the gang, bringing together LSD mirages and home cinema screens. They lose their virtual glamour turning into banal and pragmatic advertisements such as “top models are widely available”. But in Dmitry Shorin's work the banality acquires some unexpected sensual flavor and tactile sensing - the trivial turns back into the exalted naivety of culture returning to its lofty styles, loses its pecuniary meaning and discovers a new type of selflessness. The kind of selflessness the author of “Lolita” termed “the only value of art”.
Slightly matured nymphets, “die Frauen meiner Traume”, Deleuze's desiring machines are devoid of glamour as they burn out in the “city lights”, and walk around in a “house next door” setting of yachts, luxury cars and nouveau riche interiors. They permit themselves to shift status across the broadest possible range. But whether they decorate their world with walkmans or guns, teddy-bears or motorbikes, they are Girls in whatever social environment they find themselves. Their gestures are natural and steady, and this constant determines “a look from parterre” - always below the horizon –whether or not it is consistent with a particular situation of dealing with a lover, a bullterrier, bottle of champagne, caviar sandwiches, or cosmetics.
The artist's view creates a context for their objective reality, a context full of joy and desire. In this context, “ideology” is exchanged for “nostalgia” which in turn is replaced by “sexuality”, “sexuality” is aligned with “appetite”, turning into “gems” – the “ blow up ” of jeweler's art. There is no hierarchy, no Valerie Meladze's “ haut monde young ladies”, there are no verticals since they all have been transformed into horizontal lines which form ratio series hiding the progression. The girls of Shorin's visual mythology are like fraters, or are reminiscent of participants in a TV reality show, whose life is permanently open to observation and thus follows a “here and now” paradigm. What is the starting point for observation? There is none. The characters' life is continuous – eating, going for a walk, putting on make-up, contemplating, and making love. How to tell a copy from the original? Shorin's projects mould the integral texture of carnival where the integrity dissolves personal preferences, where diamonds, topazes and emeralds are used to form layers of still life reality as well as kiwis, black caviar or shrimps.
In Dmitry Shorin's world, filled with concord and harmony – in Heraclitian mass-culture plasma, in de?ja? vu iconology - nothing fades; it rather becomes closer to the memories of youth. This wonderful kaleidoscope of availabilities invented by an ideal artist restores the traditions of the “pin up” culture, and the aesthetics of the demob's picture book; moreover, it plunges into the magic of Daumier's posters and pips into mysterious windows of panoramic sights at provincial fairs. They move like pictures that suddenly appear between the shutters resembling dreams, strikingly clear and fleshed silhouettes that conjure up the clarity of ideas in Plato's Republic dialogue. The silhouettes are bound to be ritual; their universality becomes apparent at the borderline with laity where the magic image of the world unfolds against a shabby background. Cloning and synthetic pleasures reign in this border zone; the immediacy of intoxication becomes a surplus element of the visual. Nevertheless, beyond the silhouette shadows, beyond the mass-culture figurativeness there hides a new sensuality, a new paradoxical “gender approach” that recognizes the value of the female gene as a fundamental structure, and identifies its evident impact on modern technologies, which are taken to be a matriarchal, feminist mirage.
In Shorin's myths, Girl is treated not only as a character rejecting death to the sound of Schubertian tunes, but as an allegory of eternity in the iconology of constancy and comfort, as “you-are-my-joy” girl, as Vermeer's “Girl reading a letter”. This strategy will probably be developed by rejecting mass-media aberrations, and Shorin might be drifting towards “masquerade” officialized as a psychoanalytical term or towards unisex. In the “Girls' Best Friends” project, the artist discovers feminine “superfluity” in the materialized context, as if it were a continuation of feminine corporeality in neo-baroque art, like the symbol of the rehabilitated integrity of humans and the material world. In this frame of reference, woman is protected by a familiar environment which has a hallmarked gold standard. She feels secure in the balance between her personality and the trademarked values of a global society, at the same time revealing the carnival relativity of those values.
The Myth of the Girl is appealing and penetrates to the very heart in an attempt to reform the ready-made reality of glossy magazines, to transform its stereotypes into “the natural”, which is comprehensive because the pasteboard concepts of “this is the way things are”, “this is the normal course of events” come across as reliable. Apparently, Dmitry Shorin's girls have no separate existence – their figurativeness is formed by operational code combinations and invariants. The artist does not hide this “common cultural consciousness” that turns into “general reverie” and an iconology of woman as a show. His images awaken a sense of suppression by the erotic dictate of picture. They recover the light of the lost, converting the surface of the picture into the reality of satisfied desire.
Dmitry Shorin's new sincerity brings into focus a Utopian masquerade of the future where the woman's posture is projected onto the outside – to a dimension of our own - leaving the inside empty. Hence the picture itself is denotated as a veil covering that emptiness, that grand nothingness which Lacan defines as noneverythingness . But according to the artist, eternal “pin-up” eroticism is beyond that outline, and easy to reach with no risk of ending up “in the girls' best friends' world of magic emptiness”.Vitaliy Patsukov (Moscow)
