State Museum and Exhibition Centre for Photography ROSPHOTO
Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation

Vladimir Martynov
CHAOS AND STRUCTURES
exhibition

10.10.2013 – 17.11.2013

Opening on 9 October 2013 at 18.00
Yard Building exhibition hall, 2 floor

It is hardly worth to dispute the statement that one of the most notable results of foregone XX century and rapidly developing XXI century was the expansion of visual experience of humankind directly connected with the plastic arts. Previously unseen forms created by imagination freed from the mimetic tasks formerly ascribed to plastic arts, filled canvas and paper. Volumetric structures of unprecedented contours and shapes replaced sculptures in museums and private interiors, as well as public urban spaces. This was added up by all kinds of virtual structures on monitors and projection screens that often replaced tapestry and painting in exhibition spaces. New visual constructions do not necessarily spring from real-life experience of their creator, they can be the reflection of his imagination and embodiment of his most abstract or random thoughts. Mental images and mental forms of actual art ask for yet new methods of capturing and reproduction as well as new schemes of perception. The work of Vladimir Martynov is one of most convincing examples of the fruitfulness of introducing into familiar artistic context virtual phantoms that remain at the same time within the area of visual arts and thus further implement certain order in the plastic and formal chaos fraught with destruction.

This process, of course, is associated with inner complications. On the one hand, liberation of artist's visual experience leads to emergence of images unusual and sometimes unexpected in easel arts, which requires certain braveness and even preparedness to not being understood. On the other hand it is exactly this expansion of visual range that allows to accomplish new plastic structures. And, indeed, the results of Vladimir Martynov's artistic search would be less convincing were it not for his personal gift for creation of new visual forms. These forms are manifold, often flowing, opalescence, constantly moving, creating temporary color structures that exist in continuous metamorphosis.

Vladimir Martynov creates his works both in traditional painting or graphics and digital, virtual techniques. The forms created by the artist's imagination are manifold, revealing both paraphrase of certain natural prototypes and those that undoubtedly are the fruit of the mind of their creator. Indeed, the influence of the artist's architectural background is recognizable in his inclination to “project-oriented thinking”: his “projects” of sculptures, installations and whole exhibitions fully abide to the rules of 3D Max. With all that, even most complex structures to not seem overly sophisticated or completely Utopian for possible realization in real life. On the contrary, as they reveal undoubted talent to sculptural thinking, the viewer’s eye can – not only without constraint but even with visual delight – follow the flowing of one form into another and at times even mentally take part in their creation. This means, not to conceive any additional meanings or hidden subtexts, but rather to sympathize and imaginatively assist the soonest emergence of one or another plastic form-idea in its negotiation of the dominant chaos.

Essentially, Martynov tackles problems beyond the limits of practicability, let alone practicability designed by a computer's electronic brain. In that, the artist calls not only upon futurology, but upon historical experience, especially when turning to one of his favourite themes, the totem. These forms that human fantasy endues with magic powers receive new validity in his interpretation as the accent shifts from attempting to grasp the meaning hidden from the idle eye, to being able to appreciate the plastic exclusiveness and validity of mysterious object or group of objects.

Obviously, in creating new realities, new worlds inevitably reflecting his inner self and existing here and now, in a unique spaciotemporal continuum, Vladimir Martynov does not think of his creations as chromo-plastic exercise without an addressee but rather orientates them at human perception, notably the perception capable of co-creation.

By addressing his works primarily to contemporaries, by calling to their visual experience and creative fantasy, the artist does not aspire to reach beyond the limits of the future and make his creations a part of certain contemplative areas of futurology. He rather creates visual models of contemporary perception within the familiar limits of anthropocentric mind that aims to regulate the irregular and to structure the unstructured.

What we see is essentially the personal, hard one, plastic Utopia, attached to today's realities of the world with all its complexity and controversy. The ability to create Utopia is – starting as far as the Renaissance - the inseparable part of Humanistic model of the world. In our newborn century, being true to this model is, unfortunately, one of the rarest and therefore one of most valuable and imperishable life principles.

Andrey Tolstoy
Doctor of Art History
full member of the Academy of Arts
Moscow, Russia


VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH MARTYNOV
Born in 1959 in Novosibirsk, Russia. Studied in 1980-1986 at Novosibirsk Institute of Engineering and Construction, Faculty of Architecture.
Member of the Russian Union of Artists from 2003. Professor at the Chair of Graphics, Painting and Sculpture of Novosibirsk State Academy of Architecture and Arts. Currently lives and works in Novosibirsk, Russia.