TWO SPIRITS. 2017

Everything comes from the earth and returns to the earth. Everything has an infinite number of faces and transformations. A person herself creates a shell to keep the innermost in it. However, more often the society does it for her. 

Florian Graf offers a kind of constructor, in which an average form resembles the matryoshka doll. However, this is a deception. Matryoshka dolls dancing with a given rhythm jump into each other as if boasting of their similarity and emptiness. Here, all figures are very similar, but none of them can devour the other, none of them lacks individuality. As a container, each figure carries its uniqueness inside. 

If you change the scale slightly and look at all the sculptures at once, you will see a structure. Their anthropomorphic shapes accorded with a grid become a metaphor of a society, where everyone is alike and unique simultaneously, their facelessness depriving them of human resemblance. And now there is an army of chess figures marching towards us, or then the entire picture appears to be a bowling track in the middle of a game, or a Japanese garden with lanterns, or flowerbeds…

As we walk about these unnamed objects, we stumble upon the riddles of life, here and there: perhaps, there is a pot on a window shelf, and a flower grows in it, and one hears how the wind makes the fire of a candle dabble and quiver; perhaps, beneath the closed windows a new life comes to being or someone grieves silently, unable and unwilling to cast a glance upon the urn, which keeps the ashes of the beloved one. 

The simpler the form, the more complex its combinations: fire of life and ashes of death, willingness of the female and aspiration of the male, convenience of the general and inescapability of the individual, limitedness of the silhouette and infinity of the face, rapidity of growth and slowness of changes. Thus, one wrong glance is enough to recognize the future golem in an innocent child. 

Text from the catalogue of the 4th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art “New Literacy”.