153 Peter Belyi. The Silences of the Apocalypse

Fondazione Culturale San Fedele presents the exhibition 153 Peter Belyi. The Silences of the Apocalypse, a solo show by the internationally renowned Russian artist, winner of numerous awards, including the Innovation Prize in 2014 for the exhibition Signal, and the Sergey Kuryokhin Award in 2010 for the Best Visual Art Project.

Projecting us into a post-apocalyptic time, Peter Belyi leads us through a symbolic landscape composed of ruins and lost memories. There are about ten works on display: from the large sculpture Silence, built from broken pieces of wood that transform into ‘explosive’ stars – where the supremacy of the visual emerges over content – to the installation Dialect, located in the crypt of the Church of San Fedele, in which the lines of a mysterious inscription – from forgotten archaic languages to Günther Uecker’s signature nail – are created with nails collected by the artist, some extracted from the boards of the shacks in the Perm gulag, others found in an abandoned building in Saint Petersburg. Other works shape the exhibition spaces: for instance, Obscure Light presents indecipherable bright words; Pause features a saw blade hanging from a thin metal wire, spreading paint all around; Lament is an imposing funerary fountain, a sculpture of mourning; Return to Painting references classical art, a concrete cloud whose luminous rays are iron wires. The exhibition continues with the large series of works on paper, Romantic Apocalypse. They are monotypes made with black printing ink, an aesthetic abstraction in which some traces can be glimpsed; for example, the photograph of a landscape taken by a drone, the flash of a missile attack, the smoke of burning houses, and the remains of a crashed airplane.

In Peter Belyi’s artistic research, each fragment seems to hold the echo of a past world that resonates in the present, evoking faceless tragedies, perpetrated acts of violence, and the sorrows of a humanity crushed by ideologies now collapsed. Yet, no complete narrative is revealed: history remains fragmentary, suspended within the folds of time. We ask ourselves: where do these materials come from, silent but imbued with the pain of history? Are they signs of a forgotten catastrophe, or, more subtly, messengers of an imminent and uncertain future awaiting us? Belyi immerses us in an abyss, in a silence that places us at the very heart of the meaning of our being in the world. Is this a warning directed to the powerful of our times?

Peter Belyi was born in 1971 in Saint Petersburg (Leningrad). For several years, the artist has been working on a project entitled Commemorative Modelling, a term coined in the Soviet Union in the 1920s to indicate a kind of utopian architecture projected into the future. In his artistic production, the terms and meanings of this form of historical modelling are subverted, and the concept acquires the meaning of a reinterpretation of history that becomes its deconstruction. For instance, the architecture of factories and hospitals, typical of 1970s Russia, is adopted and represented in the form of mausoleums, made from plasterboard in an advanced state of destruction, precisely as if these unfinished architectural constructions had been bombed. They become emblematic examples of an ideology that has fallen into ruin. Belyi’s most recent projects seem to engage more directly with the materials used. He seeks inspiration in the material itself or in an entirely personal dialogue between himself and the chosen medium. Peter Belyi is also known as the founder of the independent artistic research project LUDA Gallery (an artist-run space, active since 2008). He lives and works in Saint Petersburg.

Selected solo exhibitions: 2018 POINT ON THE HORIZON, Perm Museum of Modern Art, PERMM, Perm MY NEIGHBOURHOOD, MIArt, Milan COURSE, Galleria PACK, Milan OBSCURE LIGHT, Roxi Ciocca, Milan, 2016 KING OF THE HILL, Anna Akhmatova Museum, Saint Petersburg 2015 RESISTANCE IS USELESS, Museum of Street Art, Saint Petersburg ZUBYA, Museum of Russian Avant-garde, Saint Petersburg, 2014 MEMORIAL MODELLING, Katzen Arts Center, American University, Washington D.C, 2013 RED LOGS – Museum of Political History, Saint Petersburg FREEFALL – Chetvert, Saint Petersburg, 2012 TOWER OF HOPE – Krasnyi Treugolnik, Saint Petersburg 2011 RED METEORITE – Krasnoyarsk Biennial, 2010 SILENCE- Museum of Modern Art, Perm, 2009 SILENCE, Galleria Pack, Milan, Italy 2008 LA BIBLIOTECA DI PINOCCHIO- Galleria Pack, Milan; Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, New York, 2007 LENPROJECT- State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, 2005 MY NEIGHBORHOOD- 1st Mosca Biennial, Central Exhibition Hall, 2004 METAPHORICAL SLIDE TOWER- Pinacoteca Udine City Museum, Udine, Italy 2003 DREAM OF A TRITON- Anna Akhmatova Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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