Wladimir Moszowski: Pretty Things

Although Wladimir Moszowski’s paintings are essentially fantasy spaces, he also incorporates topographical and autobiographical memories. They look like pictorial living-room theatres in which the course of action of the events shown is concentrated into a single moment. In addition, there is rarely mention of any specific time and time seems to have no hold over the whole thing. However, the year 1986 functions as a concealed signifier and once it has been hunted out of the wings it provides this series of paintings with its layers of content.

From which mould did I originate and how did it shape my identity? To what extent am I part of a tradition that extends further than my own existence? Why do I think the way I do? These are questions that form the foundation of the work the artist has produced up to now, in the past often in the form of installations, and more recently mainly in painting.
The setting of a wood forms the scenery that gives shape to his mental world and at the same time is the stage for his imaginary identity. The roots of this go back to his country of origin: Ukraine. In antiquity, the Greeks called it ‘Kolchis’, where Jason and the Argonauts went in search of the Golden fleece, which was supposed to be hanging from a tree in a sacred wood. This was a topos that provided much fuel for mythology, which leads us straight to Joseph Beuys, who crashed to earth there in the Crimea. However, this collapse marked the start of his artistic career and in his quest for the essence of the German identity he was to present the flora and fauna of his own region as totemistic symbols. By way of response to Beuys’ performance ‘Wie Man die toten Hasen die Bildern erklärt’, Wladimir Moszowski almost irreverently called ‘Mme Joseph’ into being. How does the artist sell his message? Can he take on the role of St Francis or is this position no better than prostitution?

Beuys certainly survived the myth, but his human existence ended in 1986, just like that of the Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky. However, the apocalyptic drama of that year took place in the north of Ukraine, and the name of the place – Chernobyl – still brings us to a standstill. What about the combination of these three actors: Beuys, Tarkovsky and Chernobyl by chance coagulate together on a particular date with no causal connection, but their association takes us closer to what Wladimir Moszowski is trying to do. Like Beuys he weaves his identity into the seam where reality unravels into myth. The stubbornness with which the identity allows itself to be grasped is very much like the inaccessibility of Chernobyl after it had struck. It is precisely this theme of the ‘forbidden zone’ that is inherent in Tarkovsky’s films, and these zones are often made to signify a wished-for place. It is perhaps this imaginary topos that reveals most of our actual desires and the elements with which one wishes to identify.

The primal scene that led to Moszowski’s current paintings is depicted in Jump II and Jump III. A remarkable element in this series is the ‘almost identical’, whereby the image repeats itself like a reflection of itself. In these particular paintings it concerns a young man who, as the artist’s alter ego, finds himself faced with the dead weight of a slaughtered pig. In the ritual of the sacrifice he will be able to rise above this burden and this leap will be a passport to the creation of his own world. The existential dividing line symbolised by the sacrificial animal also latches onto the history of painting itself, including such forerunners as Rembrandt and Fautrier. In this way the iconographic connection also extends to the sensuality of the substance of the paint itself. Paint is applied thinly, in layers or more thickly, brushed but also rubbed and scratched as if it were a sophisticated massage.

One can undoubtedly say there is an erotic undertone in this work. Not only in the shape of young women who have reached sexual adulthood, but also in the reference to Marcel Duchamp. He no longer plays the part of a purely conceptual personality, released from the materiality of the flesh, but is confronted directly with the unmasked corporeality. What they have in common is their flirting with ambiguity, word games and the veiling of reality in order then to present it as a rebus. In the diptych entitled Swing, a pig hangs from a birch tree like a swing, the birch being Ukraine’s ‘national’ tree.
The title Swing refers not only to the word ‘swing’ but also means ‘pig’ in Ukrainian. His paintings also swing between reality and fiction. This is why he describes them as pseudo-allegories. Whether they are angelic beings or geishas, there is always a built-in disruption that makes it clear that it is about impossibilities. Which does not mean one cannot derive any sense of meaning from it, since they are after all possible orientations in the labyrinth of the human mind.

Stef Van Bellingen