Petr Aхenoff

Antidepressants

Curator: Denis Edemski

Artist's collection, Moscow

Presented by the Museum “Moscow House of Photography”

In present circumstances nothing could be more relevant than the leitmotif of Petr Axenoff’s new project ‘Antidepressants’. Among the ‘rich and famous’ the onset of crisis has generated another wave of depression, from which they usually seek relief in ‘magic pills’.

Axenoff’s pictures depict these psychotropic substances in a very glamorous and modern setting, drowning them in bright flowers: intoxicating amaryllis, lily-of-the-valley and roses. In this colourful and alluring guise antidepressants have become part of the haut monde. Slow at first, like a worm penetrating to the core in the Garden of Eden, they inevitably destroy the apple from within, replacing truth with falsehood and values with formalities.

In the age of plastic surgery, Botox and other attributes of the utopian race for eternal youth, pharmaceutics play an integral role in beauty. If a hundred years ago beauty was perceived as a synonym of spirituality, founded on such concepts as education, upbringing, self-development and the quest for meaning, the 21st century dictates its own distorted game rules. Silicone values are leaders of the ball, and beauty is redolent of necessity. Unable to conceive of life without assistance from diverse substances — catalysts of the feel-good factor — the man inside languishes, enslaved by his own illusions. Like a fashionable bleaching agent the antidepressant polishes his natural entity, effacing his inner world and reducing his outer appearance to a morbid lustre. After making their stage entrance and receiving their Oscar, in no time the idols of millions lose track of the thread that connected them to reality, succumbing to the mind-bending influence of Valium or Roferon.

Stephan Levy-Kuent

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