Created by Vlada Ralko
Organized and curated by Shcherbenko Art Centre
Vlada Ralko’s exhibition School Interlining is a series of drawings-insights into human memory, namely those spaces where memories of elementary school are stored. The main colors present in almost all drawings are shades of iodine and brilliant green paint, a ‘limited palette’ of the Soviet childhood and children’s injuries of that time.
“For several years, I ‘recorded’ the fragments of my own memory, which passed through the series of my real and someone else’s real, my imaginary and someone else’s imaginary, and eventually accumulated in the clutter of an inconvenient past that will not pass. The corpus of drawings has become a container of everything that lacked a place in the legitimate picture of the personal, censored by conscience and displaced by common sense,” — says the artist.
Excerpts from memories taken out of personal contexts are reminiscent of the sporules of the past, which somehow continue to sow the future. As a result, each picture is directed to both the past and the future and correlates with the actual course of events, like a phantom sliding past the logic of linear time. Visual elements are drawn and grouped rather as nonsense, an unexpected silhouette, an unfamiliar sound that the word sometimes turns into during a long and methodical repetition. Such a sound is removed from the meaning of what is said, it has no place in an ordinary sentence. What is depicted in the paintings of School Interlining seems to fall out of the integral field of the established truth of the past, until the absurd fragmentary flashes of memories are assigned to the personal, marking the place of contact between the intimate and the historical.