Gallery Nyne: Pavlo Kerestey's Toxic Stars
Imagine kids and cameras showing up in a forest at night or in a cave, the dreamlike images of figures glowing in a toxic natural landscape, nature becoming an extension of the urban. Pavlo Kerestey’s paintings exude an almost overpowering energy.
Burning stars, falling asteroids, bloody reflections, fireballs, castings spells onto a fiery show. In spite of the catastrophic intonations, these paintings vibrate - engineered by colossal power. They are glowing at the temperature of a starry nucleus, maximally raised with synthetic colors. A state of emergency. And yet, this explosion of form and color is almost romantic, enthusiastic, life affirming, ever hoping for a good outcome. (Victoria Burlaka)
Born in Uzhhorod, Ukraine, Pavlo Kerestey emerged from the Paris Commune, a vibrant, underground post soviet artist scene in Kiev and represented the Ukrainian New Wave in the late 1990s as a prolific
painter, engaged in ongoing painting production. He produced symbolist pop worlds and surrealist image configurations. Pavlo Kerestey has since been represented by and exhibited his work in major solo and
group exhibitions from the 1909s onwards, at Post Anaesthesia, Villa Stuck Munich (1992) and Grassi Museum, Dresden (1993), Abstraction in Russian Art (2002), The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, Russia (2001), Premonition - Ukrainian Art Now at the Saatchi Gallery (2014) and more.
His painting then evolved in a multidisciplinary way -- combining painting, video and performance alongside our collaborative project, under the name of Szuper Gallery, which has since developed from the late 1990s. Since then Szuper Gallery has been a tool to develop formal vocabularies that extend and define the concept of gallery as institutional critique. Their multi-media approach spans video,
performance, installation and paintings and responds to art world and global contexts, grappling with changing definitions of the social and addresses the anxieties embedded in capitalist fantasies. In these
multi-media installations paintings spin in and out of video worlds, animations, 3D models, inhabited by a strange set of performers.
A recent work, Ballet Granite – The Cave features a series of painted installations, that re-appear in large scale in the gallery, through a series of related painting and in a animated video.
The dystopic landscape made up of rocks, caves, stars and smoke re-appears again as meticulously sculpted model set, reminiscent of the nineteenth century cave, as symbol of a kind of domestic splendor that found its fullest expression in the decadent literature of the late 19th century. In Adalbert Stifter’s 1853 Rock Crystal innocent children are lost in a magnificent glacier cave. Ludwig II of Bavaria’s castle was furnished with a luculent cavern in which the mad king was rowed across an artificial lake to the strains of Wagner. The elemental and the catastrophic feature in picturesque descriptions of a lone child survivor of the plague. The performance and paintings features on a band of survivors who reside between the rocks. The characters, a group of psychedelic astronauts, hippies on a strange voyage of self-discovery, reminiscent of Barnet Schroeder’s "Search of the Valley" or paintings by Antoine Watteau’s bucolic, rococo staging of the Voyage to Kythera.
