Revision. Part II

The photomontage composition Revision. Part I and Part II draws on one of the greatest achievements of western European painting: the iconographically complicated presentations are subject to the principles of geometrical perspective whose application is by no means coincidental.

The plot of Part I is set in a pseudo-Renaissance interior resembling the decor of modern galleries or cabinets of collectors. Though the situation may look clear, it is actually difficult to determine what is going on here: members of the collective pretend to be museum looters who are, at the same time, trying to take its inventory. The imagined setting includes flagship works of western art: The Portrait of Federico di Montefeltro by Piero della Francesca, Self-portrait by Kazimir Malevich and his Architekton, Le Voix des airs by René Magritte, Rabbit by Jeff Koons, or a video by Bill Viola. Part II of the diptych is a vision of a garden, French in style, with a classicist-like pavilion, the glass façade of which hides the scene from Part I, shown from a different vantage point. The gloomy sky is as if taken out of the paintings of Nicolas Poussin. It looms over the garden, which is most probably a place of certain iconoclastic acts.

By tearing their way into the palace of western European art, members of Revision are observing their own place in its tradition. This reflection is triggered by their artistic path: the conservative lesson in art and the harsh lesson in politics taught in Belorus, and then studies and work in Düsseldorf. By choosing the linear perspective as a means of organizing the reality represented, the artists reveal their affiliation with the western tropes in artistic explorations. The revisionist works, particularly in light of the group’s name which comes of Nikolai Gogol’s play The Government Inspector [1836; original Russian title: Ревизор, Revizor, literally: “Inspector” – from the translator], which is a satire ridiculing the corrupt class of public officers, exposing the methods of action of those having absolute power, discuss the arbitrary mechanisms of creating canons of art. At the same time, they are a fight for the artists’ own place in the presently evolving art repository.

Izabela Kopania

The text was published in the book I. Kopania „Open Set. Works from Kolekcja II of Galeria Arsenał in Białystok and Podlaskie Towarzystwo Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych”, Białystok 2012