Alexey and Misha, who are opening the "Dacha Season" at the gallery space, have never worked together before, but nominally they have a common studio – a street that serves as powerful but not the only integrating factor for both artists. The common and at the same time different for both authors is the material which they use – it is mostly found on the streets of the city. And if for Alexey these are wooden shutters, windows and doors that became a holdover, then for Misha it is waste of advertising production, pieces of plastic, plywood and cardboard - everything that could symbolize modern culture. Differences are visible in the artists’ approach - a verified plastic form on the one hand and amorphous, organic structures on the other.
An exposition is built at this affinity and the controversy at the same time and it is represented not only by the personal works of each of the artists, but also by joint works, which are exposing these differences. For example, one of the central collaboration of the exhibition is the "dacha" built by Alexey Luchko (Luka): a house of a pure architectural and functional shape on the outside, but having the extremely chaotic interior of Misha Lepyatsky (Buryj), decorated in a peculiar expressive manner. This object not only symbolizes a certain frontier state of publicly visible and personal, but also transfers the viewer to the city coordinate system, and illustrates the creative ways of each of the authors.
Some of the assemblages continue "dacha" theme, in which artists use fabric and fragments of furniture fittings. With the name of the exhibition the artists emphasize that the working on the streets is usually seasonal thing, and the opening of this season occurs all at the same time with vacationers – in the spring, when some go out to paint on the streets and others leave the city to take a rest. However, dacha is also seen as a place of aristocratic leisure and some of the represented objects are clearly underline that.
The oeuvre of Alexey Luchko (Luka) and Misha Lepyatsky (Buryj), positively, can be attributed to the non-figurative art movement, which goal is reaching harmony in a certain way through compositional, color and geometric solutions. However, for more than a hundred years of the abstract art existence, artists succeded in achieveing this goal in completely different ways and the articulation of the art gesture itself varied from a conceptual sign (K. Malevich) to a verified plastic form (P. Mondrian) and expressionism (D. Pollock).
Luka and Buryj are adherents of a relatively young and active graffiti and street art subculture, where is also highlighted the direction of "Abstract Graffiti", which drifts away from the canonical font writing called Nickname Style Writing. But the public context, the ephemerality, the geometry of architectural forms and the limited time for the creation of work, make their own adjustments, and abstract graffiti is perceived differently than painting in studio. Along with the abstract art founders, the aspiration of street artists to step away from the figurative art is to be regarded not only as an like-minded group reflection and comprehension of the canons of graffiti, but also as a way of interacting with the environment, the practice of ordering it, or introducing chaos into it, on the contrary.
With their abstract canvases, assemblages and installations presented at the exhibition, artists literally occupy the gallery space, trying to arrange it in their own way. Eventually, it is not a traditional exposition of works or representation of what was done on the streets, but a fulfilled work with the space, its reinterpretation through the demonstration of the author's approach, a violation of the rules of exposure in some ways. And, of course, the exhibition of Alexey Luchko (Luka) and Misha Lepyatsky (Buryj) is the very opening of a new season that we are all looking forward to, no matter where we will spend our summer - at the dacha or on the streets of the megapolis.
Igor Ponosov.
