LIVING AND DEAD
Solo exhibition by RASSIM®
28.04 – 26.05.2022
The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom you face, is to create yourself. The danger is that in this process you may turn out to be not quite a human being.
-Saul Bellow, “Ravelstein”
The series “Living and Dead” is situated in the space outside language, after birth, before death.
The main components of the works are various manifestations of the bodily. Urine from the artist’s body, oil from that of the earth, and used motor oil, the lubricant of the Industrial Revolution.
In his works, RASSIM® brings together one of the fundamental contradictions of society since the dawn of its existence, namely the eternal struggle between nature and culture. He melts the two concepts together, creating canvases in which we read
the history of the world in and through its materiality.
While for centuries man’s aspiration has moved towards overcoming the corporeal and reaching the transcendental, RASSIM® seeks the answer precisely in physicality, almost psychoanalytically crossing the boundaries of the ratio and reaching a form of matter unburdened by concepts.
The author redefines the position of the artist’s body—from being situated on the boundary, enduring, it becomes an indivisible element in the fabric of the world. The constructive elements of the flesh—skin, blood, and cells—are removed in the works, dissolved and reduced to a symbol. The artist is also a mediator, the creator of this union, but what is the stake of his effort?
The series “Living and Dead” presents us with a renewed content of collective memory, weaving into it the functions of modernity—the link between oil and used motor oil is precisely man, the ideologue and catalyst of this transformation. By placing these elements on a single plane, that of the canvas, the artist removes the hierarchy between them, building a homogeneous narrative in which the action develops cyclically—substances layer and consume one another. In his canvases, they undergo constant diffusion. In this way, the dualistic nature of the eternal and the ephemeral, body and mind, and, ultimately, living and dead, is revealed.
Merging past and present into one, RASSIM® creates an almost uniform mixture in which fragments of the world’s evolution are stirred, bending the axis of time into a circle, bringing it to a single point.
