Oleg Dou (Russia)Toystory (2008)Photography
Oleg Dou – born in 1983 in Moscow. His mother was a painter, and he was spending a lot of time among artists, though he was not particulary interested in their activities. He felt an urge for arts and creation some time ago, when he was working as a web designer, what pushed him to study the design. That's how he bumped into photography, and he had an idea to combine it with design. Creating brings him an enormous pleasure, he became conscious of the fact that photography is something that he always wanted to do. He is stubborn, ambitious and optimistic by nature, he likes being different, and his work, he hopes, reflects these features of his character. Oleg Dou – The Faces All images reconstructed with a lot of accuracy, emotion and authority the spirit of time, that is to say, the sprit of its time and the spirit of its creator; they tell us the story about our world, its beauties and its dramas, and they communicate it even more intensively and clearely than they did before. Dou developes and pushes to the limit the idea of a body, evoked by the surrealists, as of an object of subversions, distorsions and other mutations that undermine its integrity. I am not Dali!, the protesting and regretting scream of the author, shouted by the author, from his autoportrait-manifest; confirms that Dou ties up with the tradition in order to break up with it straight away. The curls of the famous moustache confirm us the undeniable connection with the most prominent surrealist, but, drawn with a pen, as a joke, they can be rubbed off at any moment. As the sound holes on the Man Ray's Violin of Ingres, these strokes are at a time a metaphore and a laugh mocking the authority of a stereotype. In 1927 Dali, by the way, was singing the photographic imagination, more handy and faster in the brainwave, then the obscure processus of subconsciousness, enjoying the fact that it captures the most fine and incontrollable poetry! (S.D., La fotografia pura creatio de o l'esperi, L'ami des Arts, n 18, 1927, pp. 90-91). As a real man of his time, Dou insistingly uses new technology techniques, though sometimes in his experiments he choses not to, leaving a photography bare of any retouching. He works mainly on the problem of the post-human identity, even though he has some fun creating still lives or landscapes, my incolences, as he calls them. Nevertheless, born in the imagination of the same person, these creatures and these objects come from the same world, weired, strange and disturbing at the same time. The creatures, or the robots, or the dolls, or the new indians fascinate us, touch us, seduce us and provoke the supreme disgust. That's how in Dou's works the selfhatred is sublimated into an obsessional search of a new myself. We see how the body, and, particulary, the face become an object of detailed investigations and of surgical transformations of an extreme precision. Everything that can recall the flesh is erased, rubbed, smoothed out. The china skin transparency underlines the fragility of these perfect creatures. And further on, we see them loosing their glazed facade, and we start feeling some pity towards a sick indian (her lashes have enormously grown, her skin is strucked by smallpox and she is crying with ink tears) or for other creatures, revealing the phosphorescent grain surface under the chipped off skin. But Dou, unlike the anthropomorphic dolls imagery (Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Laurence Sackman, Nick Knight or Seb Janiak, were photographing human beings as dolls and dolls as human beings), goes further in his artistic search, destroying and massacring them without a pity, going to the point of being very cruel. The only thing that can help them to avoid such a destiny: their eyes. This exception coressponds to the value that physiognomy takes under the pressure of responsibility. The thing is: yes, these creatures are responsible. Liza Fetissova |
© Make It Funky Production 
