The M2 Gallery presents the Plus-Minus exhibition curated by Alexey Maslyaev and Anna Kubanova.
We don’t need the past to live there, the past is a well in which we draw water to live in the present.
— John Berger
As the years go by, the relationship between classical and modern art still retains the character of opposition. A critic or art critic, with his supposedly astute mind, makes a comparative analysis, noting the inconsistencies of the level of technical execution, craft skills, depth of palette, complexity of compositional structures and other details of modern works with the works of old masters. However, her well-trained gaze and sensitivity, being associated with the norms and categories of tradition, do not always indicate the relevance of the experience. They explain to us, the audience, what to pay attention to and notice, what feeling to experience and what to admire especially, as if the categories of classical art were unchanged.
We miss that today we see the art of the past in a way that no one has seen it before. The famous researcher of Italian early Renaissance art, Michael Baxandall, wrote that «social facts … determine the development of characteristic visual skills and habits, and these visual skills and habits become recognizable elements of the artist’s style”2. Our spectator optics, although rooted in the classical Western European tradition, is largely transformed by the modern landscape — not by the picturesque genre, but by the view from the window. And if the world around us is changing, then why should art, as its component, suddenly resist these changes? The answer to this question concerns a look — a look that looks at art and asks about its nature. The relationships of similarity that we are trying to establish give classical works a timeless value, regardless of their importance for our actual experience of being in modernity. We stop doubting that there is a really noteworthy thing in front of our eyes.
Classical art is perceived as visually attractive and understandable, because we see the familiar object world as we see it in everyday life. The widespread dissatisfaction with modern art in this sense is explained by the properties of modernity as such,
which leaves a lot of room for doubt and searching. This is especially felt in works addressing the classical heritage. Their persuasiveness lies not in imitation, but in a new interpretation of classical images, and it is the discrepancies and discrepancies with tradition that make them modern. After all, classical culture is not a stable set of decorative forms, but a mobile, historically conditioned model of world perception and world feeling. And any modern artistic statement supporting such a representation does not, as it may seem, interrupt the tradition, but allows it to last.
— An Kubanova, Alexey Maslyaev
