solo show Dorokhov Sergey

a-s-t-r-a gallery x Dorokhov Sergey

March 6 - 23

CUBE.Moscow Art Center Tverskaya, 3, 2nd floor, The Ritz-Carlton, Moscow

a-s-t-r-a is a gallery project created by Alina Kryukova in 2018 to promote art among a new generation of connoisseurs and to popularize collecting as an integral part of the modern person's lifestyle.

SERGEI DOROKHOV'S ASTERISMS

Sergey Dorokhov is the same age as the first Sotheby's auction, where Grisha Bruskin's painting "Fundamental Lexicon" went. This event has revolutionized Russian culture, setting artists a completely different environment for the occupation of art.

In a thirty-year perspective, Sergei Dorokhov is the result of the Sotbisov event. Firstly, as a professional painter by training from the Surikov Institute, he took up contemporary art.

Secondly, he began to create painting in accordance with the Bruskinian semiotic turn, namely as a lexicon. And third, his artistic activities fit into the institutional situation set by the economics of the gallery business, fairs, and auctions, that is, modern art capitalism.

Here we can add another point, characterizing already basically the very style of Sergey Dorokhov's work - in his paintings he paints a protest. Thematically, they protest against the liberal political order in which freedom becomes only a screen for the offensive of reaction on all fronts. But what is also protesting is the very style in which they use a pictorial language that has been tainted by illusionist oppression since time immemorial.

Sergei Dorokhov lays out painting as it is-not as art, but as a demand for art, with the result that it acquires a poster-like paradox of assertion and a graffiti-like sweep of content. It is a struggle with the spectacle, rooted in an awareness of its significance and totality.

Once the artist Andrei Filippov, who belonged to the Sotbisov generation, borrowed the principle of Magritte's Golkonda and wrote in letters composed of eagles spreading their wings, "Rome to Rome," diagnosing the imperial ambitions of totalitarianism. Now Sergey Dorokhov writes "Freedom" and "Power" with letters composed of a man of the crowd or dogs of the pack, diagnosing the totality of the modern performance.

Another point of Sergei Dorokhov's pictorial language is his post-internet sensibility. His paintings seem to "flicker" and "pixelate. The protest that he paints has as its constitutive order a screen whose construction is rooted in the virtual. It is both rigidly structured and in the process of disintegration, creating a figure of desire that oxidizes the spectral perception of color, which further intensifies the sense of information-digital inbetweenness.

At the output, Sergey Dorokhov creates a quite peculiar lexicon of the digital age, playing out symbols of political, military, economic power in the spirit of social artistry, contrasting them with the freedom of the crowd as a virtualized person without properties. His two-headed eagles, "kalashs," "omonovtsy," and oil rigs are not assembled on the chessboard of the post-internet picture, but this is precisely the specificity and value of his art as an artist of the new time, one who thinks of the contours of space and time not as reinforced by the lattice of modernism but as open to capitalist disaster.

Curatorial text: Konstantin Bokhorov