Fresh breeze in a summer night.

The Alexander Museum Palace Hotel – famous for its devotion to art, with 63 rooms decorated by the works of 75 widely famous artists and the prestigious collection which, thanks to the love for art of the owner, the Count Pinoli, shines on every corner of the Hotel Museum – follows again its international commitment in the Italy/Russia year welcoming three videos by the artist Vladimir Martynov.
   “The Room”, as Italian preview, “Synergism” and “Shadows – Dark and Light” as an international preview, were projected in the Sala degli Specchi (Mirror Room) of the Museum this past July, the 17th before a generous audience. Needless to say, catalysing the participation on a Sunday in the middle of July in our little town, seaside resort by “vocation”, represents already in itself a noticeable event.
   The works of Vladimir Martynov are definitely not what we supposed they would be. Used to the endless line of conceptual artists, we expected the “usual” sequences with “hidden” meanings, and were prepared to force our mind to detect some sort of “signal”, some hints that could reveal the arcane “meaning” of the work.
   The three videos asked for nothing of this, offering instead to the audience moments of great empathy. Sure, digital art may not be easily appreciated in its whole technical “density” by a public of non-experts, but in the case of Martynov no effort was required: multiple sensations passed through the screen penetrating the conscience of the vast audience present at the video showing.
   And this is precisely the aim, the purpose the three videos tend to: inspiring subjective emotions, letting the visions – led by the masterly sound design, ad hoc masterpiece by Master Dmitry Mazurov – create in the observer a state of passive reflection that vibrates by the deepest strata of the subconscious, then activate sensations and perceptions that push beyond and much higher than an idea, a concept – no matter how brilliant they are.
   In a moment when (our little province town in particular) they “indoctrinate” us with an art, the fruition of which is only accessible to experts or people equipped with a virtual and imaginative “instruction manual”; in a historical phase where critics do not follow anymore the ideas and fascinations of the artists trying to interpret them, but it is rather the artists themselves who support the interests of critics to obtain their consent, comes a breath of fresh air: an art that “talks” to everybody. At the same time, paradoxically, an art that leaves everybody perplexed, right because it hides NOTHING behind the masterly chromatic interactions, the dissolves and the patently evocative sound, which needs no “explanation” justifying the presence of a critic. This provokes the risk of remaining alienated, because we expect a logical “meaning” to be “discovered”, to be pulled out from those changeable shapes; we decide to embark on the same old challenge: understanding what the artist wants to communicate. But this attitude blocks what is, instead, the TRUE MEANING of Martynov's abstract work: letting the imagination surpass the limits of the concept and lead us to a deep immersion, each of us within our subconscious borders, each of us with our personal experiences. Art, therefore, not as mere “intellectual exercise” - as they are teaching us to contemplate – but as an opportunity to access higher states of conscience, an opportunity that never begins from the mind but from the stratus below, that stratus that only certain Masters, navigating among symbols and archetypes, are able to activate. 

Lorenzo Di Loreto – Pesaro Italy

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