ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS

 

The last time that one and a half meter works by Ievgen Petrov could be seen was the exhibition “Where We Are Not”, which was held in 2017 in the Vilnius branch of the “Tsekh” gallery. And now, three years later, in the project “Environmental Conditions”, consisting of ten works using dry and wet techniques, he returns to the format of a large watercolor.

 

If you carefully look at the artist’s previous exhibitions, you will notice the way he is reacting to the world: sharply, critically, and ironically. In “Environmental Conditions”, Petrov, on the contrary, focuses on the documentary description of Lebenswelt.

 

The mediator of the artist’s interaction with the world is his neighbors, in the broad sense of the word, the people he sees from his balcony, jellyfish thrown out of the sea onto Odesa beaches, and various environmental metamorphoses.

 

Despite the fact that the main emphasis was placed primarily on the technical side, real fans will immediately notice that almost all of the works have conceptual bindings to previous projects. The monochrome watercolor “Against the Sun” sends us to the acutely social exhibition “Where We Are Not”, the beautifully detailed works “Stone with Parasites” and “Jellyfish” to the “Pier” project, where the analogy of a stone with a pier is easily traced, and the parasites that stuck around it from all sides – with people, and gentle “Passer-by” and “Yes, fuck off!” to the absolutely insanely sarcastic project “Beach”. And of course, Petrov simply could not forget about his main conceptual character – the dog. The peaceful “Fog” and “Downpour”, in a sense, send us to the alarming “Dogs of Petrov” and the cruel “Fights without rules.”

 

The artist himself focuses on the fact that for him this project is contemplative and he wanted to focus on subtle technical issues. But this is precisely what gives us, as spectators, an understanding of how he sees the world around him, what phenomena he works with, therefore the exhibition “Environmental Conditions” is directly connected with other projects, where instead of observing from the outside, Petrov places the actors of the everyday theater surrounding him in his conceptual field.