THE ART OF THE POST MORTEM
In the past hundred plus something years, mankind’s attitude towards death has changed dramatically. The fact of death as a toy has ceased to be an element of what is now called the mass culture; such memorabilia of the past could now be taken either as a sacrilege or a whim mixed with perversion. After the end of the WWI, the Post Mortem photography was basically extinct. Before it was a practice when the deceased was photographed on his deathbed or even, after the make-up was applied, in a family circle as being alive. After the session, the extravagantly framed photographs were placed in common areas around the house. Another memorabilia, the posthumous masks, did not survive the WWII: a modern days musician would not hang a cast of the Beethoven face in his study, and the writer - of Pushkin, which was completely normal for their predecessors several decades ago. Once death became public and in such numbers, it lost its right to be admired, no matter how great it was.
Western civilization, which survived two great wars last century, no longer wants to view death as an element of an everyday life. To investigate and to copy the breathless human shell has become the occupation for forensic scientists and physicians, not for the artists or grieving relatives. Modern society prefers to live with memories of the dead, letting go of the moments associated with their passing and the suffering that accompanies it.
Modern artist needs a fair amount of courage to pull the death out of the stylization circle, where it was tacitly placed. Disney’s dancing skeletons, shining diamonds of the skull from Damien Hirst, or the many death metal music bands – none of these have anything to do with the physical part of death.
But Sergii Chaika found the courage to look again in the face of such bare death. He transferred to the canvas the posthumous masks, so beloved by our ancestors. No longer a labor of artisan (the production of death masks required some real craftsmanship), but a work of an artist, the face of death experienced a dramatic transformation.
From the sculpture departments of art schools, where masks continued to lead their modest existence, they again reveal themselves publically. Chaika’s series “Masks”, even though falling into a seemingly cozy and harmless still life genre, will obviously make someone think not only about the direct meaning of the word "nature morte" (dead nature), but also about the relationship between temporary and eternal - the opposites, which are fundamental in classical art, but dismissed by contemporary art.
However, to consider these works as a neoclassic manifesto and/or a call to return to the naivety of past generations means to accept the fragment as a whole. Every message finds its final meaning in its context, and in the context of today’s tragic time,
the message with which we are dealing sounds particularly relevant and at the same time far from shocking. It takes an absolutely detached and disregarding the moment view to place "under one roof" the founder of the Russian Empire, who forever changed the country’s order, and the exiled soldier of the Apsheron battalion, the ancestor of Ukrainian literature.
Death makes everyone equal, just like art, so on the canvas, the viewer only sees the masks with still, but, perhaps, not completely frozen, faces of those who once led completely different lives.
And now these masks are in front of us, painted in dark tones, a bluish gray color and in a technique that is rare in modern painting, with layers of pigment penetrating through the multiple layers of shimmering lacquer - making the images even more of a transcending reality.
And such a monumental return of death and history into our everyday lives makes us contemplate about the death being a gateway to life and art being a gateway to eternity, and in this – there is their deepest connection.
Dmitry Suchodolsky