The exhibition Trilogy by the AES+F collective, a group of artists from Russia – Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky and Vladimir Fridkes – can be seen at Aeroplastics Gallery, in Brussels, until the 7th of November.
At Aeroplastics, a gallery housed in a typical three-story Brussels building, we are welcomed by a large scale photography triptych announcing the aesthetic of the whole exhibition throughout the gallery floors. The obscured video rooms, the soft lighting of the space, which is marked with spots of light on the images and the sound and the music from the vídeos echo through the building, placing the visitor in an intimate atmosphere.
Trilogy was a project completed in almost a decade and it consists of three groups of work: Last Riot, The Feast of Trimalchio, which were presented at the Russian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, in 2007 and 2009, respectively, and Allegoria Sacra, presented in 2011 at the Multimedia Museum of Moscow and at the Biennial of Contemporary Art simultaneously. There is a straight aesthetical relation with the paintings of the Old Masters (there are noted references to the works of Giovanni Bellini [1430-1516]), which are combined with contemporary technology, characters and issues.
In all the works presented in this exhibition, AES+F collective shows ironic and critical perspectives on issues of the contemporary world – the violence of video games (in Last Riot), the luxury and excess in the Feast of Trimalchio, and the religious differences staged in an airport location in Allegoria Sacra.
AES+F creates a perfect combination of the tradition of painting and image composition with the digital aesthetics, and, more importantly, it transforms the Old Masters references in moving image. Thus, it offers us large scale audiovisual works in which the spectator is immersed in moments of pure delight and calm, with the slow motion camera movements, but also in moments of pure tension and inquietude.
