Ivan Novikov

2015

Installation
Materials: canvas, tempera, photographs

The ‘environmental age’, which has already come, is inextricably linked with the fact that by discovering planetary processes, man turns the elements into his tool. He enters the real race of ecology, having turned his life into ‘the surrounding environment’, from which nature itself turns out to be excluded. At the same time, it turns out that all the main ‘battles’ of this world have been missed by humanity and thus, the formation of the unconditional Anthropocene is only now revealing its consequences: the turning point when a new eco-cultural order of the impersonal power of the climate occurred came unnoticed. In his project, Novikov investigates the role of nature as a political factor in the history of Cambodia. For this research he applies political ecology, drawing a parallel with practice of painting. Creating his canvas the artist strives to liberate painting from a subservient state and to transfer it from the object (the canvas, the stretcher) to a hyperobject (something to which we are connected, but not something we possess). Painting plays the role of an activist or a climatic phenomenon. The modernist cult, planning to cover nature with the grey neutrality of concrete, here should meet spontaneous resistance.