Works on paper, from the “diary” series

“Instead of hermeneutics,
we need the eroticism of art.”
Susan Sontag

A diary is a diary. It is not just intimate, confessional, mysterious, sometimes mystical (think of Laura Palmer Lynch's Twin Peaks diary), but ideally, it does not involve a "confessor" at all. As a rule, it is synchronous to the event. It is documented in an alla prima manner, which gives it credibility precisely because of the sincerity and frankness of the "first gesture". However, the diary is simultaneously disingenuous and hypocritical, as the urge to reveal secrets or, as we would say today, the will to be transparent, equally prevails over the prescription to keep a person's public call secret.

It is common knowledge that in the European tradition the diary genre developed much later than in the East, which produced classic examples of the genre, such as: "Diary of an Ephemeral Life", "Notes at the Headboard", "Diary of a Full Moon", "Notes from a Cell"... Interestingly, many of them were written by women, and there was even diary literature of the "female stream". Crossing the bridge to the present, which is already unthinkable outside the context of psychoanalysis, it should be noted that the first feature of a woman's text is infinity, length, and diffusion. "The female unconscious is gripped by the desire to begin, to take on all sides at once, to mark several races at once, without focusing on one phallic impulse to begin and end."

In the artist's diary pictures, there is often an oral motif ("in the mouth" and vice versa), which is also sometimes gendered. It is a kind of symbolic rehabilitation of some deep archaic complexes, phantasms or purification cycles. In addition, it can be likened to women's writing, which spreads like a suddenly spilled liquid, its flowing out being similar to the "cathartic" process of defecation and vomiting.

The truth of this Chinese diary is that there is no "Chineseness" in it, that is, no stylistic and cultural, here "hieroglyphic" art. This is, as the artist admits, a view of "market China". However, these are not westernized sketches from nature, but rather visual feelings and associations "about", coming from both observation and the author's absurdist "inner cinema". At the same time, the shimmering, living surface of the drawings, the seemingly arbitrarily disturbed, careless, sometimes even brutal, but really perfectly guessed, "captured" gestalt of each sheet, the "hollow" ambiguity of the paper background, the insight and sharpness in the details are evidence not only of their alienation from the Zen visual tradition, but also of their closeness.

In Vlada Ralko's diary, the erotic is inseparable from the corporeal. An interesting point is the absence of various body parts and limbs in many figures and the concentration of the gaze on the body as such: it is here that the main erogenous zone of the image is focused and fragmented.

The gastronomic element accompanying the body, which appears here and there in the drawings, is capable, if we turn to the same Chinese tradition, of even more subtle recognition of erotic impulses and tastes: "The little monk shuddered with his whole body, as if frightened by something, and then, turning over, he lay face up. Wenzheng's hand continued to stroke his body, and suddenly, to his surprise, syicai felt that he was stroking a fleshy swelling that resembled a fresh mantou doughnut." (Olexander Soloviov)

* Ellen Siksus, "Woman's Body Text"

* "The Love Games of Wenzheng", a 17th-century Chinese story