Date: 03.02.2017
On 25 November 2016, in RSAL the exhibition opened “Re-reading Molière. The Theatre of Marina Azizyan.”
The RSAL presents Marina Azizyan’s large-scale project created for Vita Nova, the St Petersburg publishing house. The exposition features sketches of illustrations for Jean-Baptiste Molière’s plays: The Bourgeois Gentleman, Tartuffe or the Impostor, Don Juan or The Feast with the Statue, and published books from the library’s collections.
Marina Azizyan’s works combine a dramatised decorative effect with an illustrative narrative and reflect the traditions of the World of Art movement (Mir iskusstva in Russian) and French Livre d’Artiste. The fragments of text in the individual images and the simplified construction of the figures introduce the aesthetics of a modern comic book to the structure of the work.
Many of the original sketches of illustrations were created by the artist using her favourite sewing technique, or “seeing fingers” as Azizyan calls it. This artistic method creates a backstage effect, visually separating the theatrical audience from the scene.
In the Blue Hall of the RSAL, Marina Azizyan casts an unusual spectacle in explanation of 17th century art. The originality of the action is achieved by transmitting the style of Molière’s time via the attitude of modern man.
