On the Codes of Existence

Mem Fliigel ist zum Schwung bereil,
ich kchrc gem zutuck,
dcnn blieb ich auch Icbendlge Zcil,
ich hiitte wenig Gliick.
(Gerhard Scholem Grass vom Angclus)

We have always been imprisoned by illusions and doubts, between a dream of flying and earthly wishes. These uncertainties and obstacles have brought progress towards vague horizons, forgetting the real target that a reasonable mind has been searching for centuries: the possibility of flying to stars, that moral firmament which wraps up our existence. This infinire pursues Riabow who can't help using numbers, the myth of Icarus and colors which remember medieval and ancient paintings.

I am not speaking about metaphors, but about a symbol that immediately comes out from his pictures. It seems to me an imagery without motion, a kaleidoscopic difference between colors, like sudden insights from the roof of sky, a sort of coming back; but perhaps is our unconscious that arranges pictures in such a way.

There are, I think, two main leitmotivs in Oleg's creation: estrangement that also means going away, and a point of view without relativism. The observer (but do we really know who that is?) is situated in a position that seems going away from representation shown in the picture: it is not our mind that imagines a ship fishing in our everyday dish, not our eye seeing tumblers or others mythical figures; Oleg, leaving out and suspending the natural connection between subject and object, gives to his fishes, butterflies and landscapes full of colors, the point of view which belongs to the observer (numbers...), that of our private and mental investigation. A number is always a symbol of something else which has been thought, in our mind it is a fact, an action together with his perceptions. We are in a world which is gazed by something else, we are the past, illusion and hope. A world where we canlive on our impressions, taking them from an unidentified spectator, perhaps an angel flying with open wings, trying to decipher codes of existence, in the lapse of a moment fading away. Men and worlds, in Oleg's paintings seem to be without real outlooks. A point of view without relativism is instead an observation reflecting on what has been already perceived. Our acts of knowledge are always situated on a superior level, that is what explains estrangement from the two different levels of the real world, too; the first is imagery, the world as it is seen by human reason; the second are numbers and burning colors which only evoke reason and mind, being impressed and printed in bodies of representation itself (even Icarus' butterfly wings remind to a definite zymology).

Who is the observer now? Perhaps that Angelm Novus by Klee, taken by Walter Benjamin in his essay about philosophy of history. If we accept this we can say that Oleg's creation is absolutely metaphysical: the angel sight over a world made of illusion and uncertainty.

(Marco Maniscalco Bologna 2003). Published by www.amassart.com.