Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art presents the Green Sun exhibition – a fantasy universe conjured by TODAYOLDS in which bananas, tacos, and fried eggs attack like real monsters and absurdity offers a key to the anxieties of a modern-day urbanite
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A multilayered visual world fusing humour and existential fatigue
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A plotless detective story (in which the viewer is an accomplice) set in a fake California and featuring characters repeatedly slipping on banana peels, gorging on tacos, and speaking a fictional profanity-rich slang
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Supermarket shelves, soda fountains, T-shirt prints, posters, logos, and advertisements – the familiar urban milieu worked up to grotesqueness
In his essay On Fairy-Stories, J. R. R. Tolkien famously argued that, while anyone can imagine the green sun, creating a world in which the green sun would be credible requires much skill and effort. This thought has been motivating millions of world creators ever since, with the artist known as Sasha TODAYOLDS among them.
His fictional universe only masquerades as a make-believe California as seen in cartoons and cop flicks. In fact, however, it is a case of sheer wackiness, with characters tossing off shots of hot sauce, repeatedly stepping on banana peels, and gorging on tacos, all the while pointlessly exhausting themselves with exercise and golfing. Their deceptively profound T-shirt inscriptions seem in stark contrast to their mumbling speech flush with profanities. One assumes that, just like in Tolkien’s novels, they must be speaking a kind of artificial language somewhat reminiscent of the Nadsat of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.
In most of the paintings, the action is steeped in a space oversaturated with text. On closer inspection, the viewer recognises the familiar urban milieu of flashy supermarket shelves, cheap eateries lined with soda fountains, and streetscapes obscured by advertisements. Constantly popping up amid these mundane surroundings are infernal-looking monkeys and even the devil himself, evoking the Mexican tradition of retablo folk paintings.
Fried eggs, vegan burgers, bananas, and mustard overrun the entire canvas space, literally chocking the protagonists and revealing our contemporaries’ unhealthy obsession with street eats. The artist painstakingly emulates all kinds of prints – labels, packaging, notices, and garment slogans. Transpiring through this persistent visual cacophony is a kind of melancholy characteristic of Pop Art, the first movement to address the dismal burden of a consumer.
Although the artworks feature recurring characters, any attempt at discerning a linear narrative is bound to fail: even a murder case pronounced in one of the paintings does not turn the proceedings into a classical detective story. With any artistic inquiry not necessarily leading to solutions, the artist’s refusal to comment on his works asserts the viewers’ right to find their own way through this chaotic realm.
A prominent presence in the contemporary independent Russian art scene, Sasha TODAYOLDS was born in Astrakhan in 1999 and received no formal art training. His visual language comprises a signature blend of surreal nihilism, absurdity, and satirical metaphor, while his works string an endless variety of situations, images, and characters into bizarre plots full of chaotic existential humour.
Subscribing to the notion that the artist’s commentary tampers with, and narrows down, the viewers’ perception, distracting one from what is of paramount importance – i.e. the artwork itself – TODAYOLDS avoids explaining his art, leaving his visuals open to interpretation.
