The video "L'intermittence du Coeur" (Heart Intermissions) was inspired by the famous 19th century Russian painting "Encore, more Encore" by Pavel Fedotov

In search for her own aesthetic genealogy Olga Chernysheva for quite some time has been trying to find correlations between her method of artistic reflection and Fedotov's classical works - her graduation thesis at the VGIK (Russian Film Academy) was dedicated to the study of his art. She was fascinated not so much by realistic aspects of the genre painting but by Fedotov's odd poetic melancholy, his concentration on the trivia, monotony, and ennui. This aspect of everyday existence is directly related to Foucault's "hermeneutics of the subject", to practices of self-reflection, "caring about your own self", to what Foucault calls "spiritual exercises". The philosopher's thought is focused on one single problem: how do these self-techniques work? Are we capable of grasping our subjectivity as an object which we "create" throughout our life? Seemingly senseless and monotonous play with the poodle in Fedotov's painting and in Chernysheva's video installation is directly referred to what Foucault called "being with your own self", i.e. to the same practices which since the times of antiquities were related to divine existence as such. Divinity in the absence of God, a caesura of a kind, a pause in the fabric of life, monotonous essence of everyday existence - this is the message of Fedotov's painting for Chenysheva. But her video is not just a replica or an animated cameo to "Encore!". The poodle's monotonous jumps in the video are interrupted, the rhythm is replaced by arrhythmia which, as much as cardiac arrhythmia, in an entirely different way intones the whole visual space and emphasises the protagonist's solitude.

Olga Chernysheva
L'intermittence du Coeur (Heart Intermissions) Commissioned by ARTiculate