Dimitri Tsykalov: Flesh and Bones

Russia-born, French trained artist Dimitri Tsykalov's works have been spotted in the English blogosphere widely this month thanks to Booooom, which has drawn attention to some of his latest works: sculptures using fruit and vegetables.

One series Meat exhibited at the Fondation Francès in 2009 particularly stands out as Tsykalov progresses from spatial installations using wood and splinters to construct cars and rooms to photograhpic works featuring models covered in raw meat and bones.

Art is no longer beautiful and innocent in Tsykalov's eyes, it's monstrous, violent and disturbingly sexual.  Behind the bruitality of the subjectst taken up (war, death, terrorim, weapons), the violence of rawness and of its exposition challenges the status quo in our art world. (By the by this would have been the best entry for RAA's summer exhibition this year on the topic of Raw). Art seizes to be pretty little paintings hanged up above the fireplace in some lord's magnificent country house, to be presented and admired. Art in Tsykalov's hands is rustic and bloody, exposing the relations between the murderer and the slaughtered, the shooter and the pray, the weapon and the target.

Meat as a series is beyond pornography. He who runs in the open under a hail of real bullets, he who feels like walking meat, the target for a sniper, is truly exposed. It is this sort of risk that art exposes us to, when it emerges at times, as it does in Tsykalov's case.