The Naked Room presents Circa 2020, a new show of Kharkiv-based artist Vitaliy Kokhan. In the past three years, Kokhan dedicated his studio time to producing sculptures. A curated selection of his recent pieces is now on display in the gallery space.
Vitaliy Kokhan works with different media, but it is sculpture that manifests his artistic identity in the sharpest way. Being a technically demanding and quite conservative kind of art, in Kokhan’s hands sculpture becomes free of its formal burden. If Kokhan makes a bust or a statue, he softens their grandeur and traditional nature by choosing ordinary materials such as cardboard or papier-mache. However, when he chooses solid materials—concrete, cast iron, or bronze––he addresses down-to-earth subjects or simply limits himself to small sizes. This approach allows him to play around with viewers’ emotions anticipated by three-dimensional artwork,and, at the same time, undermine any expectations.
The exhibition in The Naked Room seems to be concentrated on the subject of female figures. The space is occupied by female-like postures, varied in sizes. Tiny, mid-size, big, and enormously large “ladies” are displayed next to each other. Shapes of their tall bodies are undetailed and rough. This bulk of deceptively similar objects gives an impression of an artist who immersed himself too deeply into this simplistic topic. From prehistoric art through XXth century modernism, female statues have remained possibly one of the most popular and trivial genres. But Kokhan isn't afraid to take a step into the genre’s banality and consciously exploit it as a “zero form”. Sculpture serves him as a sort of vessel to complete quite a different artistic task. Professional sculptors can hone the details of their models for months until they reach perfectly accomplished, desired, and controlled results. Kokhan opens up his practice for something he cannot predict––a mistake, a production failure, or a reaction of a capricious material. He calls this “to set the unplanned on rails”. A traditional sculpture is destined to have a complete and flawless one-possible shape, but the very process and conditions of its creation stay invisible. In his turn, Kokhan sets an open sculptural experiment with materials and forms, each of them opening up a myriad of potentialities.
It is foremost Kokhan’s curiosity in character, scope of use and limitations of various materials that drives his work up. The artist is equally interested in working with cardboard, concrete, cast iron, but also with more conventional materials of wood, copper, or bronze. Such a variety of raw materials packed in more or less similar shapes opens the artist’s lab to a spectator. Kokhan’s show openly demonstrates the difference between a cardboard shoulder and its wooden analogue, between a gloss of copper and a texture of bronze patina, while the fact of choosing specifically a female figure as a prototype can be interpreted as a plain tribute to both sculptural and modelling traditions.
