On March 10, 2022, the CAAC Gallery in Manhattan hosted artist Oksana. Kvarchuk opened his solo exhibition titled "Let the Fool Pray to God."
A painting displayed in the main exhibition hall is an appropriation of orthodox church frescoes in terms of scale, theme and color, except that the picture adopts the popular flattening, symbolization techniques and collage methods; followed by the installation of the work: the main picture of the two religious figures disappears in color, leaving only gray silhouettes, the main picture is a single humanoid bracket of two apostles, the face is hollowed out into a hole, people can put their faces in the hole to take pictures of the scattered saints. This approach is certainly not new in itself, and historical places around the world have this kind of photo game similar to dressing themselves as saints or magnates, except that the game here is carried out in the context of the exhibition, as if the characters have just escaped from the painting.
The construction of the exhibition venue, organized by Japanese curator Kyoko Sato and the artist, seems to be a direct hint to the current global god-making movement. In a small enclosed space in the gallery, several "precious" forged icons are on display: the stained glass windows of the Gothic cathedral are moved into Gothic-style photo frames, and in collages such as fragmented textual information images of new media are portraits of contemporary fashionistas such as Bill Gates, who replace the original "portraits" of saints, shiny, formal, pretentious, under the illumination of a single-point lamp, hanging from the ground in front of a black velvet background.
In a corner of the black velvet-enclosed space, a large, coiled candle is placed on a small table, suggesting and seducing an ancient sacrificial impulse, an involuntary desire to worship. In fact, in our field of art, our field of politics, don't we borrow hints of this impulse of worship from the realm of religion? The founders of religion, with their rich philosophical conceptions of the whole, provided long-term spiritual comfort to mankind, but it was their external idols and forms that enabled religion to develop greatly, especially to be accepted by the masses. It has to be said that the triumph of culture is often the triumph of the media.
Speaking of media, the details of the work are imbued with the artist's almost neurotic sensitivity to the power of contemporary media, a neurotic sense of the environment of our time. On the one hand, the saints of the classical world were replaced by new idols and influencers who symbolized success and excellence; On the other hand, "in our time, people not only create their own idols, but also more easily incarnate themselves as idols." ”
Back in the main hall, looking at this face-changing game installation, the artist's intention is clear: this is the focus of irony, the great irony of today's self-idolization, and this irony depends on people's conscious or unconscious participation and cooperation, in the process of your singing and I appearing, the audience and the actors are all in one to tout each other to complete a self-proclaimed saint performance. People are no longer shy, as they used to be, because they pretend to be saints in the cloak of saints. Today's people are almost always the kings of their own media communities or information cocoons, and they are convinced that they are really kings.
Regarding the accumulation and questioning of the media presented in the work, the artist said that he wanted to express the mother's irresistible anxiety about the media fragments on the child's growth and education, especially the cognitive destruction of the child by the idol shaping of the new media. But the viewer sees the mother and child as nothing more than a reference, because the title of the exhibition, "Let the Fool Pray to God," points to the audience's unselfish submission to idols in a most clear and critical way.
In this eventful spring, the artist inadvertently spread the anxiety of truth and uncertainty caused by the omnipresent public opinion war represented by idols in every corner of the exhibition hall. Obviously different from the transcendent spiritual ethereal realm created by the overall gold paving of the ancient Orthodox mural background, the artist only leaves some broken gold film on the picture, suggesting that the spirit of the forged icon in the field is lost.