Andrey Parshikov (English translation)

Andrey Parshikov
Contemporary City foundation
Moscow, 2008


DELTA by Eléonore de Montesquiou is the most extraordinary in the project “Ultra-New Materiality”. Eléonore is not a Russian artist and also hardly she can be related to postdiaspora. She is French and she has lived in Estonia for a long period of time where her creative work was the most efficient, and then she moved to Berlin. Thus it should be reminded that a lot of her films are dedicated to Russia and post soviet space. The big documentary project about the first emigrational wave of the beginning of 20th century (Eléonore’s family has direct link to it) that was shown in Saint-Petersburg, interviews with Saint-Petersburg' young artists, films about the Russian community in Es-tonia – due to these works Eleonore is known in the West. Her project “Atomic cities: Sillamäe”, presented in “Vinza-vod”, during the 2nd Moscow Biennale and “Olga Olga Helena”, at the festival “Contemporary art in traditional mu-seum” in Saint-Petersburg, brought her popularity in Russia. Eléonore has proposeda project for the program “Ultra-New Materiality” that is not related to any national context. On the contrary, in compliance with manifest’s requirements, through this exhibition Eléonore chose films where the ab-sence of frontiers, of national self-identification, absence of any ethnical belonging, except for phenotype, are predomi-nant. Videos and drawings underline a sensual immanence that holds a response to the infinity, short-term memory that then transfers forever to subconscious level. The works are united by the theme of nocturne – all sketches were made during night time. Airport, ambulance, waiting room. Night helps the artist to erase finally any geopolitical shade, any statehood and conventionality, describing only a dreamy world. Thus we cannot say that Montesquiou’s works are apolitical and abstract. On the contrary, hereby poli-tics comes as absolute imperative at global level. Fruits of Western democracy, called to idealize the world, to protect human rights and lives, show here their inconsistency. Solitude and alienation, cruelty and absence of compromises, dehumanization and technogenezation of modern civilization – Eléonore recreates all these abstract characteristics based on very precise examples of personal experience, thus documentation of works provoke inevitable sense of fear, which the spectator can not get rid of. Her work is cold, aesthetic, well thought off fixation of key moments of emo-tional explodes, where people are only the part of landscape, made out epicenter of this explosion. Composers created soundtrancks for the artist, which play an important role. Some of her films start just with music. Therefore films of the project “Delta” can be called charmed, frightening, experimental nocturnes. Where sounds were written during the day, video was documented at night, and, uniting, they create discordant compositions, disorienting the spectator dis-orientated both in space and in time.
The main thing that Eléonore succeeded with in her work - is the ability to describe the present in a way that any viewer will agree with her point of view. Exact hit in collective unconscious with scrupulous, maximum critical observation makes Montesquiou one of the most significant artists of the program “Ultra-New Materiality.