Kirill Chelushkin — Iron — Rabouan Moussion Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 8 → July 31, 2013

Kirill Chelushkin plays with the world’s textures. When he draws Mens, it is often in a brutal and uncomfortable position. His portraits are marked by realistic techniques, but he soils the canvas with stains and scratches. This cataclysmic realism reminds us the fragility of human being, facing a world which shifts under his feet.

In very contrasted drawings, soldiers in close-up plan stand in a very thick material, with hard and rugged features. These cinematographic images were inspired from documentaries, and the captured moment is crucial: the faces are those of the end of World War II, when soldiers of the Wehrmacht began to understand that victory eludes them. These men who look away seem to foresee their fate. No fight scene but a zoom on human: the faces are no longer those of a victorious “race” but they are those of mankind collapse.

By reading the memoirs of Albert Speer, architect of the Third Reich, Kirill Chelushkin realized that our modern Europe sometimes echoes Hitler’s fool desires : a great Europe governed under federal way, holding the population in closed borders. The current dictatorship is no longer based on the systematic eradication of a stigmatized population, but on the disappearance of State for the benefit of Finance. Nowadays, those who are pointed at are the people in deficit, which should be given an austerity policy.