On View
Fragment Gallery
April 7–May 21, 2023
New York
From a young age, Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov surrounded himself with bugs. Fascinated by their strangeness, the artist was drawn to qualities that would stimulate hostility in the majority of people: the bugs were out of favor outsiders he might relate to. Growing up queer in Russia, Fedotov-Fedorov was consistently mentally and physically bothered by his peers. As the artist associated to me, this difficulty triggered him to disassociate from his body totally, and he concerned think about himself more as an animal than a person.
Fedotov-Fedorov’s present solo exhibit in New York, now on view at Fragment Gallery’s recently transferred space, talks to the artist’s ongoing fascination with unclear kinds of life, while likewise marking a relocation far from the conceptual methods he is best understood for. A series of paintings that form the most engaging part of the exhibit pull the artist’s practice into an extremely surrealist mode. Executed in acrylic on canvas with mainly pink and grey shades, the paintings present group pictures of relatively monstrous figures in abstract dystopian settings. A family picture with an animal using a lady’s mask and a wig (2022), for instance, portrays a group of 5 figures, varying in size, standing focused in an environment similar to plants. The figures slightly look like animals—a few of their ears are located atop of their smudged heads, instead of on the sides. Their faces are distorted, bring the carnivalesque quality of a feverish dream.
The tiniest figure, who is obviously using a wig and a mask of a little woman, is no less disturbing than the rest. I cannot help however read this figure as the artist’s self-portrait, attempting to pass as human. There is something about this images that remembers Francis Bacon, a sensation of being suffocated and engulfed by one’s environment. Interestingly, Bacon did not separate in between human and animal flesh, notoriously stating: “If I go into a butcher’s shop I always think it’s surprising I wasn’t there instead of the animal.” Devoted to metaphorical painting in a time when it was thought about unfashionable, Bacon developed visceral representations of suffering flesh in the after-effects of a war in which individuals had actually been butchered like monsters. Yet there was likewise a sort of eroticism to this fleshiness, blurring the limit in between desire and death.
In the exhibit’s wall texts, Fedotov-Fedorov remembers numerous intimate encounters with bugs, indicating the truth that these brand-new works stay quite notified by his early experiences. At just twelve months old, the artist gripped a wasp into his fist, gotten rid of by the synchronised discomfort and enjoyment of the stinging feeling. A little later in life, he started surrounding himself with ants, letting them reside in your house throughout summertimes, and conserving them in containers with soil in the winter seasons. For 2 years, he provoked an ant to bite him every day, encouraged that it may activate a shift into the insect world. Playing below his godmother’s house in the countryside, the artist carefully observed a spider capturing and eliminating an insect. In another memory, the artist remembers seeing a parasitic larvae break out of an insect’s body after devouring it from within. Fedotov-Fedorov explains these occasions as “a grotesque ballet of life and death unfolding in front of my eyes.”
I initially experienced Fedotov-Fedorov’s operate in 2021, when I was on the jury for the AES+F Artist Residency at ISCP. Looking over his portfolio, I quickly felt the queerness of the work. His videos and efficiency documents portrayed people engaging with and handling the functions of animals, consisting of moths, bats, octopi, and snakes. Moving through space fluidly, these animals withstood gender category, and the artist, constantly masked, typically starred as the primary character. Though Fedotov-Fedorov did not discuss his operate in relation to queer identity, he discussed in his cover letter that he had actually just recently come out as gay. Based in Moscow at the time, Fedotov-Fedorov’s work showed the coded signs up artists in Russia need to make use of to check out queer identity without being censored.
The present exhibit at Fragment Gallery takes its title from the only video consisted of in the program, Snake Changing its Skin (2021–23), pointing back to the artist’s past while likewise hinting obliquely, maybe, at modifications in his practice. Fedotov-Fedorov informs me that he turned away from conceptual and efficiency operate in favor of painting when Russia’s war on Ukraine started in February 2022. Having transferred to New York just a couple of months prior, after being granted the previously mentioned ISCP residency, he had problem with the contrasting and complicated experience of existing as a Russian dissident in the West. The conceptual methods that he would generally rely on failed him in this minute—he felt they did not have the immediacy of his anger.
There is one painting that especially sticks with me. Hugging animal celebration (2023), a ghostlike image in grey and brown tones, portrays a cluster of fantastical, animal-like figures drifting in a featureless space. This phantom recollected Hedgehog in the Fog, a Soviet animated movie from 1975, in which a hedgehog anxiously roams through a foggy forest searching for his friend, a bear. The bigger philosophical message that this cult classic brings is among existentialism, indicating the sensation of being lost in one’s own presence. It is here that Fedotov-Fedorov’s experience of disassociation, both from his own body and his home nation, many poignantly manifests itself, more so than in any conceptual task. This is an instructions worth pursuing, and I hope Fedotov-Fedorov will not avoid the insights provided by his rely on painting.
