This exhibition brings together the Concept/Art/Confession Group’s most progressive artworks created by Alexey Shlyk and Maksim Makarevich from the last few years. These artists are two of the numerous artists that compose the CAC Group. Putting together twenty-two photographs, six sculptures and one installation together, the CAC Group offers an astonishing example of the extend to which fashion and its peculiar aesthetics contributes to philosophical commentaries.

The Minsk (Belarus) based CAC Group is a promising art group well known both in Russia and Belarus, whose multifarious projects mingle together painting, sculpture, installation, and photograph among others. Working alongside the curators Izabella Tarasova and the author of projects Oleg Shobin, the CAC Group attempts to adopt a new approach to curation and creativity.

This time Oleg Shobin in collaboration with the photographer Alexey Shlyk and the sculptor Maksim Makarevich launched the Brain Fashion project, which engages photographs and sculptures in dialogue.

Expressionist black and white colours dominate the photographs, while the general composition enhances their apparent rigidity. Similarly, bichrome or monochrome sculptures investigate into the contradictory notions of stretchiness and stiffness.

Nowadays, no one can escape the visual impact of fashion. Luxury brands, the cult of fashion, glossy
photography, and advertisements, all of these features seem embedded in the consciousness of everyone, regardless culture and society differences. In that sense all spheres of social and cultural life are infused with its influence.

Among its various components, luxury shoes perhaps epitomize the model of fashion, its dress code, and its mainstream aesthetics. In this exhibition Yves Saint Laurent, Kenzo, Paciotti, Aldo Brue, all of these famous brands are called into question with insight and wittiness. Shlyk and Makarevich followed the canon of fashion by using standard representation of shoes, yet they conspicuously adopted different perspectives whether abstract, geometrical, poetical, paradoxical, emotional, prosaic, or most importantly philosophical. In fact, the shoes embody existential questions.

In order to explore these philosophical perspectives, Shlyk and Makarevich also examine Chinese idioms. The photograph entitled Dao for instance transforms a usual lace into the Chinese word dao, which actually puns on the word ‘walk’. Following the idea of pun and distorted meanings, some of Makarevich’s sculptures replace the conventional idea of shoes with life and movement by death and stillness.

In the end, rather than affirm their artworks as mere panegyric of fashion industry, to its credit the CAC Group chose a more insightful path in problematising their artworks’ capacities of showing diverse intuitive and philosophical responses to the world of fashion, which eventually raise thoughtful and ironical questions.