Olga Chernysheva
Chernysheva’s latest photographs of Moscow are a series on everyday life, which was exhibited by Krokin Gallery Moscow at the FIAC in Paris this year. The artist has again taken images of Moscow and Muscovites seen when passing the streets and wholesale markets, when using public transports, seen when buying a coke at one of the numerous small kiosks spread all over the city.
It is Russian pop art, breaking down the lines between art and life. Since the late 50s, pop art had been permeating our lives as the subject matter involving common objects and commercial images. Pop art is a western cultural phenomenon, having been born in New York and London, now entering Moscow. Olga Chernysheva’s photographs show everyday consumer products: the common journals of the newsstands, cigarette packages, hot dogs, shoes in masses, shirts in masses, and not missing the famous matrioshka/nestled dolls (a mass product in itself) shown as part of this everyday consumption.
Yet, what makes Chernysheva’s works special, is neither solely the idea of a new and special type of Russian pop art nor the fragments of Moscow’s everyday life itself, which is interesting and great to look at, especially for those who want to have a truly realistic picture of what everyday life in Moscow in the twenty-first century is like. But, it is the artificial character that one perceives when viewing her works and which gives her works a unique charm. It is the way she presents form, color and composition of both these elements that gives her work this unique sensibility and harmony that makes one wonder whether the choice of the motive or the way of taking the picture came first. The work appears as one single, sensitive flush of fiction, dream, reality, idea, form and color.
Thus, Olga Chernysheva takes a picture of a closed kiosk where, when opened, fried pullets are sold, indicated by red chickens painted at the bottom board of the trailer. An old woman in simple clothes and a scarf around her head, with a bound package laying on her left, is standing in front of this kiosk, her back towards the artist’s camera not knowing that she will become part of a work of Olga Chernysheva. Waste and paper is flying around the ground, and in the foreground a red colored plastic matches to the same red of the painted pullets at the bottom board of the trailer. Another fragment of every day life shows skirts in all colors hanging outside a stall of one of Moscow’s great outdoor markets.
Having lived in Moscow for half a year myself now, I am aware of both the charm inherent in these tiny moments as well as the value of catching them and therewith preserving these moments in artistic photography.
