Should One Believe in Beauty?

The question posed by Anna Brochet seems to be directly connected with criticism of the ideal "Me"-created by our consumer society and constantly thrust upon us through glossy magazines, women's TV programs and ads for new cosmetic items. Their mission is to transform modern woman into a celluloid Barbie doll who is not subject to decomposition, and who knows nothing about work, sweat, blood or death.

Should one believe in beauty which is constituted from a catalogue of ideal forms of lips, breasts, buttocks, and eye shapes? Should one believe in beauty which is assembled from parts, covered with flawless skin, and stretched over the metal skeleton of a bogus Maria from a 21st-century version of the film "Metropolis"? And what if clumsily applied lipstick turns into drops of blood, dried in the corners of vampire lips, and running mascara gives the appearance of Gothic winking of an immortal beauty?

Anna Brochet's post-media artwork based on photographs tears open the hygienic plastic packaging of beauty. Her artwork vibrates; the paint is in motion, trickling down the surface of the canvas, far too big in relation to the "original" from a glossy magazine, and at the same time too small to be looked at as one looks into a mirror. Should one believe in the beauty of a painting made from a photograph-an ad-when the painting takes upon itself the image of a "bad" or "horrible" picture; when the painting mimics the "original" from an epoch of mechanical reproduction and leads up to the boundaries of the present-day consumer fetishism? Fetishism is connected here not with an object's component parts, such as skin, lips, nails. . ., but with the hedonism of artistic gesture of the artist, who naturally takes pleasure in smearing paint on canvas.

Olesya Turkina

During the Soviet years, everyone had a standard set of toiletries: "Threefold" cologne, "Red Moscow" perfume, some toilet soap, baby cr?me from the "Freedom" factory, and "Leningrad" mascara, which had to be periodically remoistened with a little spit.

Now priorities have changed. The modern individual cannot even imagine herself without a sparkling white smile and perfectly smooth skin around her eyes. About ten years back, numerous foreign cosmetic and perfume companies rushed to conquer the "wild" Russian market, systematically instilling into people's consciousness a "new definition of beauty" and, by implication, a direct path to happiness. They furiously began to explain (basically to our women) the nature of liposomes, keramides, cellulite, and other such curses (until the 1990s, happy workers had no inkling of the existence of such things). Simultaneously, from the screens of TVs and the pages of domestic publications, the hearts and minds of inexperienced consumers began to be captured by ads for "miracle remedies" which were capable of removing fat deposits, lengthening eyelashes, smoothing out wrinkles, and imparting radiance to the skin and unforgettable luster to the hair.

For the uninformed public, professionals drew graphics and diagrams in which they depicted cutaway sections of our skin showing how yellow, red and green particles collide with each other and smooth out, destroy or take root in human skin.

In one splendid moment our nascent consumer society received a new ready-made formula for life, according to which it was now obligatory to carefully look after our exterior.

Moscow artist Anna Brochet noticed these social metamorphoses at the end of the 1990s when-during a summer at her dacha, caring for her children-she spent some time going through a stack of glossy magazines. As a professional graphic artist, Anna Brochet could not simply pass by the obtrusive illustrations and graphics depicting cutaway sections of skin and unnatural smiles. It was right then that she conceived her new project: "Should One Believe in Beauty?" Its idea is that the artist takes ads of cosmetic companies from the pages of magazines and transfers them to canvas. Thus the advertised "ideal exterior" lands in the different dimension of the surface of the canvas.

But, as is well-known, a genuine work of art always has some spiritual element and therefore cannot tolerate falsity. The picture spoils the "ideal lips" with streaks of blood, and the "expressive gaze" with black spots under the eyes. On the surface of the canvas the well-groomed hair becomes similar to cords and molecules of vitamins and amino acids on silly and joyful balloons.

In trying to define Anna Brochet's paintings, most likely they could be classified as "new pop art", reflecting today's trends. If the slogan of the pop artists of the 60s was "sex, lies and rock 'n roll," then now it can be paraphrased as "safe sex, proper nutrition, and a healthy lifestyle."

Thus the new reality, as opposed to that of the 60s, depersonalizes mass-media images. It elevates to the level of pop art not the cult images of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Coca-Cola, and cans of Campbell's soup, but simply the body parts of unknown models: lips, cheeks, hair, teeth, nails and hands. Today the body parts of a faceless ideal person have become the symbols of "new pop art."

Completing her project in a logical manner, Anna Brochet takes the mutated images she has created on canvas and returns them to their initial forms as advertising photographs.

So visitors at the exhibition will see several wide-format billboards, where there will be ironically flaunted bleeding lips, deformed nails, and faces of pseudo-beauties which resemble the mask of "Zorro". To paraphrase the words of a well-known philosopher, it can be said that Anna Brochet's art will save the world from beauty.

The exhibition presents about thirty 30x35 cm and 20x25 cm paintings, and three wide-format photographs.