Raman Tratsiuk, Sickles, 2021

oil, canvas, diptych: (each part) 50 x 40 cm signed, dated and inscribed on the back of each work: Raman Tratsiuk/Sickles 2021

ICONS OF SAID HISTORY. I have been creating a series of paintings called "Sickles" since 2020. The starting point for the series of paintings depicting sickle shapes were tools I found, acquired or bought back - old sickles with clear signs of wear. My pictorial gesture has no symbolic meaning - it is not an imaginary symbol - but a copy of real objects. Each sickle image in my paintings has been faithfully reproduced from its physical original; these objects are quoted" in my paintings, undergoing only minor compositional shifts in the canvas space. At the same time, for me, this is an important gesture of critical deconstruction of history - in the colloquial consciousness, the sickle, which is an element of peasant symbolism, also taken over with the communist idea of "democracy", in my works also refers to its more primitive meaning - as a typical tool of women's work. I treat all traces of exploitation, wear and tear of the tools as sculptural gestures - which are signs, invisible in the historical narrative, of the silhouette of a woman doing manual labor. The instruments I have described have become culturally displaced signs - icons, signs - indicators of female labor. Arranged in a series, the images create a visual narrative continuity in which not only the reproduced object is set in motion, but more importantly a linear story of alienation. It's as if there are gaps, cracks between the repetitions - which Hal Foster, in his interpretation of Andy Warhol's series of mechanical works called "traumatic realism," points out that it's between the different variants that there is a gap, a hole that allows us to notice "The Gift." Writing about hyperrealist art, Foster points out that sometimes its illusionism is so exaggerated that it seems to anxiously want to hide a traumatic Reality - but this anxious desire points even more to the Real. In my story, the repressed have to deal with historical and political causality. The actual object - the sickle as a labor tool - is reproduced with great accuracy on the painted canvas - but in the accumulation of this procedural sign (the repetition of the canvases and each act of the painted reproduction) there is a disturbing gap through which the perceived causality of women's labor begins to be displaced." Raman Tratsiuk BIOGRAM: Born 1981 in Brest, Belarus. Abslowent of painting 2004 and Intermedia 2007 UAP. Lives and creates in Poznań. Co-founder of the Bergamot group. In 2012 he defended his doctorate in visual arts at UAP. Curator of many exhibitions and festivals of contemporary art.