Metaverse — The pun intended
Born and raised in a city from the outback Orenburg, now performing in Moscow, Marsel Yalalov explores the line between the brilliant and the insane in our century, where modern technologies are both liberators and captors of the body and consciousness. His design-related past allows him to see our world as if it was iconographic, simplifying and challenging one’s imagination and willing to decode his mysterious works.
In his oeuvre, our artist with a beautiful French name, but Tatar origin, Marsel Yalalov devotes a big share to the topic of digitalization. It is seen from a first glance, as one is often confused, when looking at Marsel’s pieces, not being able to understand whether it’s an edited picture or oil canvas.
Playing with spectators’ minds, Marsel highlights the importance of technology and personal gadgets in our daily life. Indeed, there’s no doubt a modern person would struggle without hot morning coffee from coffee machines and online worldwide communication via the most important pocket device of our times — the smartphone.
Artist believes that the contemporary visual art world should speak with viewers in the same language, and if nowadays it is a language of online games and digital files — then the creator’s job is to find a way to implement that in their work to resonate with the modern spectator.
Marsel’s scarily good imitation of screens’ neon light indeed makes one doubt whether there is still a differentiating line between visual and digital art. Marsel states that if art is a representation of reality, and our modern reality is basically an edited Instagramable picture — then why should visual arts be any different?
One can clearly see how Yalalov is fascinated with modern technological advancement, but in fact he is more proud of the fact that he had a chance to perceive it’s evolution — from pagers to Teslas and VR goggles. Artist highlights that the most interesting thing about digitalization is the ability to live multiple lives in one.
He is illustrating it with his acquaintances, who are playing video games, existing in the beautiful Neverland, and at the same time being serious coders that are mining cryptocurrency and collecting NFTs.
And all this can happen while Marsel is having fun eating apples together with his sons.
“Someone is mining crypto in Canada, and I’m just here, eating apples on a playground and observing my shadow. Isn’t this funnily absurd?”
Marsel uncovers the absurdity of our reality, when billionaires are busy with space travel, while there are still people who are starving to death.
He thinks that it is the artist’s job to analyse the world and then show the audience a slice of the data they gathered, to make one think, feel and then do something. Yalalov has great sociological grounds, being the unconscious follower of Chicago School, stating that each of us lives in a personal social reality. And how interesting is that to investigate how people communicate, while existing in completely different worlds?
“He lives and sees in his world, while I live and love my reality, but then we meet in a completely different already spatial dimension — how confusing is that?”
Very interesting indeed, this is why Marsel is creating his own reality via his multidimensional works, mixing QR codes with oil paint.
“I cut out pictures with their context and paste them into another image, decoding the general context. I just think it’s fun.”
For Marsel, the modern person is a collective image of the experience of all other centuries. This is why often his pieces have heroes but they are either faceless or depicted in very unusual circumstances and realities. He sees the 16th century as our love for carpets, the 90’s in our fashion, and even the future in our technologies. This is how he depicts everyone at the same time, vividly underlining that our modern reality is something fictional, something we can create by ourselves.
One should focus on the good, the artist believes, so the world could become a better, though still absurd, place to live.
