Text: Daria Totskaya

A meadow on which someone is hiding and watching - this is the theme of the works of Svetlana and Alexander Roshchenko. The topic of peeping, voyeurism and even stalking in itself is not new for the fine arts, but rather traditional: the nymph Daphne ran away from Apollo and turned into a laurel bush, Actaeon found Artemis (Diana) while swimming and was torn to pieces by dogs or killed by an arrow, Old Testament David spied on bathing Bathsheba (Bat-Shua). Bathsheba's plot gave world painting a lot of reasons for magnificent nudes, only in Roschenko's case, Bathsheba is a spectator.

In the paintings we see either grass or the observer himself. There are several questions for the observer (if only he could speak), but for now let's deal with herbs. Creators use painting techniques that border on randomness, meaning the unpredictable: monotype, automatism. In some places, the species of the plants depicted are lost, and we can only talk about abstraction with landscape recognition - nature inspired abstraction from the category of figurative inspired abstraction in Western terminology. All this riot of the unconscious contrasts strikingly with the rationally written observer according to the canons of figurative painting.

So, our ancestors had to understand better about plants in order to know what to eat and how to be treated - and then they settled among them the terrible, strange - in other words, mythical. They seriously believed that the herbs are whispering among themselves when people do not see that they are crying, screaming, moving from one place to another and even have their own character ... Who will now say what kind of robbery, such grass helped from blood stagnation and how it bloomed fern? Such specimens as the Bogorodskaya grass even managed to subsequently merge into official medicine, but something has not yet been drawn from those stories about herbs from the point of view of the human psyche. A luminous mythical Midday was flying among the meadow grasses - let's remember that it is bright, and we will rush on.

If you delve deeper into Russian folklore, you will find the phrase "green meadow" almost everywhere. That we do not know what color the meadow is, why is it emphasized every time? Another linguist Alexander Potebnya studied the symbolism of color in Russian folk poetry. And here's what he was able to establish: the word "green" originally replaced the word "light". That is, in folklore it is a "bright meadow". “Green longing” is already another, about the American blue, dragging deep into the swamp, and the blues derived from it - cold shades that help to reduce pressure and accumulate strength due to calming, even stagnation - but with long contemplation they drive you into sadness and melancholy. In Roshchenko's works, green in his works is 90% warm, which means that it is still close to the original meaning of "light". Sergey Ozhegov in his dictionary mentions another interpretation of the word green - a pale complexion, which again brings us back to the word "light".

From the point of view of Krasnodar artists, a picturesque meadow is a bright place where famous and unknown herbs, even mythical ones, grow; a place close to the unconscious, perhaps to childhood and the era of myth as the childhood of mankind. We all remember meadow dandelions and plantains applied to cuts as one of our childhood memories.

And the observer invades such a space. Sniper. Observing the creative path of Roshchenko, the presence of weapons can be called not accidental. Their works are generally full of technogenic realistic upgrades of human figures, such as pilot's goggles and diving suits. But weapons are a special topic, raised almost to the rank of a fetish, an open demonstration of their own ability to defend themselves and show aggression, attack, suppress the offender. The offender here is not a sniper, but anxiety itself, poured between the stalks of herbs, a feeling of understatement, hiddenness of some important and, possibly, dangerous element of life.


The art object in the form of a "soft" sniper rifle only emphasizes this.






The sensation of being tracked, not only in paranoia, but also in more common cases, is a mental response to stress. The desire to control the external and internal world, which is not satisfied and drives many people to panic in the modern world - it’s not even about the neurotic level, but about a certain level of normalcy of the human psyche, which has recently been tested for strength by all these stories with coronavirus and lockdowns. The appearance of a dangerous, armed observer of the viewer in a "light", safe meadow is a vivid image of the worldview of a modern person. Anxiety image. The need to do something about it globally, to look for common coping strategies, if not for everyone, then for many, to understand and overcome universal stress. And the fact that "Meadows" appeared before the first lockdown once again proves the prophetic ability