Art critic Alexander Bykovski has reviewed for </odra> Petr Kirusha’s personal exhibition Der Zauberberg Revisited that was held at the Maxim Boxer Gallery in Riga earlier this year. The project offers an unexpected visual response to Thomas Mann’s masterpiece. Stripping the famously talkative novel of its endless philosophical dialogue, the artist translates its world into dissolving portraits and luminous, X-ray-like images.

As the first half of the project’s title suggests, the exhibition reflects upon Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain). Its protagonist, the young engineer Hans Castorp, visits the secluded sanatorium, where people are being treated for tuberculosis. There he meets a variety of patients with whom he engages in prolonged conversations on every topic imaginable, from the decadent state of European culture to the nature of death. Quite literally, all that the novel’s characters do is talk, talk, talk. Yet, in his works, Petr Kirusha seems to ignore all the talking, reducing his reinterpretation of the story to a kind of silent theatrical production.

It is worth noting that Mann’s novel has a rich history of theatre adaptations, and a much modest number of cinema or TV productions. At the same time, Kirusha’s visual language is almost entirely rooted in digital screen aesthetics, most notable in his use of dispersed and somehow inverted colours. For this exhibition, he created twelve portraits of The Magic Mountain’s main characters. Their images consist of dots and strokes of bright paint that seem to be either falling to pieces or clinging together driven by a hidden magnet.

The portraits are correspondingly enhanced by the images of the characters’ lungs (they are displayed separately in a group of their own). These improvised watercolour X-ray images form a perfect metaphor for the novel itself and for Kirusha’s visual technique in general.

In almost all of his works produced over the past few years, he’s been demonstrating the same approach when the paint is being somehow restrained: while it covers the white canvas or paper, it almost never goes on covering it entirely. The same goes for the images of lungs being taken over by illness: we see the sparkles of alien colours here and there, we almost see them multiplying, but we never see them taking full control. However doomed the characters in the novel might look to us, they stay in our imagination only until they are able to speak or at least think.

The portraits are hung on black walls, each above a schematic chalk drawing of a sanatorium bed, its front board sharp and visible, while the other is more blurred. On one hand, this image serves as a reminder that each patient of the sanatorium lives at the oblivion’s door. On the other hand, such an approach allows the viewer to treat the more visible frontboard as anything from a gravestone to a Heaven’s gate. With these empty beds, the portraits themselves look like colourful comic book bubbles, and the images — as memories of people already deceased.

As a whole, the project works more like a total installation with Kirusha’s works being its centerpiece complemented with the soundtrack by Blue Pencil. The concept of curator Kirill Kobrin was brought to life by art producer Alexander Bokser. His work played a central role in shaping the exhibition’s precise rhythm and atmosphere, from the calibrated illumination of the black gallery walls and the drawn beds to the careful integration of sound and the fabrication and installation of all visual materials. Bokser was in charge of all technical aspects of the project including lighting design, sound installation, logistics, and the full cycle of prepress and production.

The second half of the project’s title brings to mind another great 20th-century novel, Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 Brideshead Revisited. While the black walls and empty beds perfectly resonate with Mann’s story, Kirusha’s works themselves with their dreamy glow of isolated clots of paint would feel more at home in ironic and nostalgic universe of Waugh. His novel starts with a Latin phrase Et in Arcadia Ego (Even in Arcadia, I exist). This verbal construction is knowingly ambiguous, as the pronoun “I” might refer to Death. Yet, with this ambiguity in mind, this reference invites us to view human and cultural decay with a little more ease.