CROCODILEPOWER: …hovering over the face of the waters

Imagine a wild garden – free from the constraints of geometric design where vitality reigns unchecked. Exuberant. A place where insects, together with all other organisms and animals, return and find their rightful place and balance. The concept of uncultivated garden embodies the essence, as a place of the wild, the genuine, the authentic, but mostly, the unknown. 

Garden is the archetypal space of rest and tranquillity, with a flavour of certain secretiveness or hiddeness. It becomes a superstructure of the political, social or official sphere. Through yet another lens, garden fascinate us – it has a hidden strange time, constantly ongoing, almost unstructured. In this temporality, the lines between human and non-human are vanished. Delving deeper into perception, one can hear that strange silence that is not silence at all … All seems to have its own time, its own duty – one temporality occurs on the surface, another deep within. 

In the world today, the temporality of the body of Earth has become a pressing issue, by no coincidence capturing the attention of many contemporary thinkers. Planetary time represents the time of the Earth, of minerals, caves, underground water or rocks. Still, something artificial infiltrates this body – the presence of plastiglomerates. A new type of rock where the particles of molten plastic and natural minerals fuse into one, has prompted a community of artists to imagine the future. The artistic world turns its eyes to it, as the issue is no longer marginal.

CrocodilePOWER focuses on the same place, reinterpreting mythological narratives, combining them with contemporary imagination. It is far from any coincidence that the paintings and sculptures presented at their solo exhibition named “…hovering over the face of the waters” also invite us into peculiar gardens that hang in surreal timelessness. Yet, this dreamlike feature is different – contaminated by something essentially artificial, just like the rock mentioned above. They thus create new fluid worlds that combine the past, present and future, the natural with the artificial, the living with the lifeless, the human with the non-human.

CrocodilePOWER is a group founded in 2011 by Peter Goloshchapov and Oxana Simatova. They work in the medium of painting, sculpture and installation. Peter Goloshchapov was born in 1982 in Moscow. In 2005, he graduated from the Moscow State Stroganov Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts. He became a grant winner of the Ministry of Culture of the RF in 2005, 2008 and 2012. In 2012, completed an internship at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. Since 2019 Peter Goloshchapov is a member of international Academy of Ceramics, Genève, Switzerland. Oxana Simatova graduated from the Moscow State Stroganov Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts in 2008 (diploma with honors). She is grant winner of the Ministry of Culture of the RF in 2002. In 2012 completed an internship at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. The artistic duo works and lives in Budapest.

Text: Erik Vilim