Art in Brief
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
YURI MASNYJ: The Night’s Still Young
Metro Pictures
Yuri Masnyj’s art bears the burden of historical and theoretical self-consciousness lightly but unwaveringly. Mr. Masnyj uses a set of handcrafted shapes over and over again in his sculptures: black bottles, imaginary books, stringless replicas of acoustic guitars, wooden beads, modernist geometric sculptures, and pieces of wood that are painted in such a way as to suggest backward or forward movement in space. Many of these objects appear in still-life paintings throughout art history. His drawings of pictures hanging on walls in vaguely delineated interior spaces almost always include pictures within pictures, posters, paintings, and drawings that emulate the styles of Modernist masters such as Picasso. The perspective suggested by the linear elements inevitably gets contradicted or distorted. These are not drawings from life, however; they are psychic spaces or mental constructs. The drawings represent a recycling and transformation of the formal language of modernist art.
A number of sculptures and drawings in the exhibition are titled “Not yet titled.” This suggests that they are in a state of becoming. Mr. Masnyj transforms modernist formal devices and elements of genre painting into a new system of signs and symbols. After all, as the title of the show indicates, “The Night’s Still Young.”
A long black bookshelf shape filled with faux books, beads, sculptures, and bottles, “Not yet titled” (2007), reads as a piece of furniture and stand-alone sculpture simultaneously. The imaginary books that appear in Mr. Masnyj’s drawings and sculptures have words and letters on their spines that could have been lifted from Russian Constructivist posters. As symbols they are neither real nor unreal, neither abstract nor concrete, and neither rational nor irrational. They are enigmatic symbols of the pervasive influence of past culture, but since they are original objects they have the potential to offer us a way forward.
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