Sergei Shekhovtsov is so devoted to his favourite material that for a while he even signed his works 'Sergei Porolon Shekhovtsov'. The artist has been using 'parolon' or foam rubber for almost everything since 2001, although the first such oeuvre that comes to mind is the human sculptures. Examples of these are the museum visitors or the movie-going public that fill an entire cinema, as we saw in Shekhovtsov's San Paulo Biennale installation. Perhaps with good reason the artist's foam-rubber figures frequently represent spectators. Shekhovtsov has said that for him foam rubber is above all the material used in manufacturing divan beds – a place for relaxation, contemplation, sleep or daydreams. Essentially this material is passive and pliable. But Shekhovtsov often treats it like wood or stone, carving out a shape with  decisive and almost brutal strokes of the chisel. The artist's works are a kind of deception where the astonished viewer cannot immediately comprehend their true characteristics. In this sense they have an affinity to Jeff Koons' famous sculptures of blown-up toys fashioned in stainless steel, yet they act as a reverse mirror-image. Both Koons and Shekhovtsov play with the ambivalence of soft and hard, strong and weak. Koons makes his defenceless, cheap, mass-produced toys heavy-duty and high-value. The Russian Shekhovtsov, on the contrary, gives porous amorphous foam rubber a tough, resilient and unyielding appearance. It is no coincidence that Shekhovtsov often creates sculptures and installations parodying an image of power, might or majesty. This can be a grandiose throne crowned by the two-headed eagle, the emblem of tsarist and post-Soviet Russia, or a motorbike as the modern-day symbol of power and street-credibility. Shekhovtsov allows his audience to make an amazing discovery: both the sovereign symbol of the new Russian State and the iron horse of modern macho man are actually made of foam rubber, a material associated with kitchens, housekeeping and shabby Soviet toys. But the installation in the Russian Pavilion is ambiguous: although the foam-rubber motorbike is soft and artificial-looking, it has 'crashed' through the pavilion wall. And unlike the real-life metallic iron horse, a foam motorbike comprised of numerous air bubbles can never get smashed up – it can simply fly away in the breeze, without even hitting the ground.
Irina Kulik |
