You aren’t an angel, And neither do I. But I wish to be with you, So anyway you will be mine.
«Ranetki», an all-girl Russian pop-rock band
Sixteen year old Tanya Pioniker is a very young artist. She belongs to the generation we know very little about yet. Born in Yeltsin’s Russia and grown up with social nets, digital emotions and apocalyptic subcultures, Pioniker is the first one to open the door to the might be future of Russian art.
With all her teenage honesty and directness she brings down a torrent of contradictions on the viewer. Street graffiti, symbols of the emo culture, Gothicism, violence, fashion industry and Twitter poetry. Yet this dizzying cocktail could hardly be associated either with postmodernist irony or provocatively bad painting from the ‘80s.
American slack art — hipster art prior to the invention of touch-screen mobiles and a secret ancestor of «the new boring artists» — emerged only to disappear into thin air. Pioniker’s works are more in-depth, humble and less pretentious. Avoiding often vulgar, saleable ‘true-life’ trash aesthetics, the artist speaks of the present in quiet and precise tones, thus making her story sound more powerful and convincing.
«Wordless Confession» is an exhibition of graphic works, which seem to be scribbled by a schoolgirl during breaks between classes. What does the artist confide with her works? From her almost secret dairy we learn about contemporary sensitivity trapped in social nets by the catchers of young souls. Free from the burden of historical heritage, Pioniker focuses on «human» most broadly understood. Indeed, «human» is the main resource of the present, which the artistic eye intuitively recognizes at once.
The artist’s works are an accurately recorded broadcast from the image processing plant. The art which had been developing alongside heavy industry presented the world with the first abstraction inspired by smoke from factory chimneys. The art which has developed alongside the production of affects can give the world the first abstraction assembled from the wreckage of visual attractions. In the world, where the main commodity is a human emotion, the struggle for freedom is unfolding right in the human heart. «Anyway you will be mine» is a battle-cry leading the millions. And we are the first ones to witness these battle scenes.