"Grotesque Paradigm" 2016

фотограф Дмитрий Оболенский
obolensky.co
Formal training as a painter, lithograph & sculptor has not dissuaded this young Russian artist from experimenting in different medium, rather, has afforded him a polyvalent background which acts to complement his work with photography as an artistic medium. His past years active professionalism as a commercial photographer, focusing on subjects specialized in fashion and modeling , has neither lessened his capacity to re-orient his artistic expression with a lens. The same attention to light, luster and tone carry to his series of staged reality photographs, created with digital processes, yet the contents’ vary radically with the aesthetic beauty desired by the fashion industries demands for perfection of a projected ideal of what constitutes “beauty”, sexuality and seduction.

The work at first appears to be a colossal exaggeration of the subjects, ones which might be found in a circus selected by Fellini, or perhaps, as violently grotesque as the cinematic paradigms of Todorovsky. We observe still images imbued with a dramatic tension, undertones of a surreal comedy, extreme gestures and extreme individuals clothed in apparel which could be stated as belonging to both Dell Arte and sado-masochism.

The evident staging denies a crass interpretation of boorish pornography, the spectacular use of light which near eclipses the subjects- adorned in equally spectacular dress and holding a facsimile of poses born of a beaudoir of quai-German expressionism, desists an association with a re-interpretation of devices common to those whom wish to play between the explicit sexuality of pornography under an apologetic guise of fashion or aesthetic “nude”. It is a difficult and tenuous separation from an adultery of style, yet the artists’first experiments with the medium of photography as an “art”, only a half year underway, depict an aplomb in evading facile dramatic components in favour for a more poignant imagery. It appears to be a direct exploration of the extremes of perversion, a mockery of style and vanity.

Following the shockwaves created when Mappelthorpe offered intimate and exquisitely rendered portraiture of his immediate circle of associates and friends, wherein the explicit sexual content, allegorical symbolism and powerful aesthetic quality of his black and white master prints arose in the artworld of the 1980’s, sexual deviation, profanity and the value of artistic freedom in the medium of photography as greatly challenged. The debate, while not new, was ignited once again with contrastive arguments echoing the century old polemic of a mediums oscillation between document and vehicule of artistic subjectivity, of the nude and the pornographic, seized the NYC sphere of contemporary art. The maelstrom of invective from the conservative academicians and the exuberant solidarity with the homosexual artist, whom portrayed homo-erotica, phallus and flower, pistil challenging strengths of symbolic metaphor, served to awaken an otherwise near dead society whom rarely gave further mind to photography. It is not my intention to compare nor to begin a contrastive analysis between Mappelthorpe, a master of the medium and technical master of printing techniques, with Obolensky, a relative amateur whom is in a period of bold experimentation. The significance lies in understanding a relative causal episode in what has now evolved as the collective memory of the photographic audience, the evolution from a time when what was once considered, “shocking”, “scandalous”, “outrageous” , to that of the present where the content, exposure of genitalia and skin is commonplace, abused to the extent of rendering it a cliché rather than point for further innovation or rupture.

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