Breakfast at Cronus. The Birth of Venus

Centered around the foundational narratives of the Ancient Mediterranean, the exhibition “Breakfast at Cronus”, by Valentin Korzhov, takes a look at the ancient myth of Cronus – the begetter of time – and a number of other archetypal characters, in order to reveal an expanded ground of reality; an appearance embedded in pure actuality. Korzhov's takes cue from Heidegger's notion of poiesis, an act of fabrication or creation that is identical with metaphysics and poetry, as much as with the immediate givenness of a material world, ready to be transformed by us. This revealing is also an opening towards truth or essence that lies at the heart of our technological imagination, and helps something come into being. Yet the eight works in the exhibition – referencing always makers of poiesis, Phaeton, Achilles, Hermes – are not conceived as an anachronistic look at a bygone past, but engages with the meaning of antiquity and origin as the absolutely transcendent: A playfulness emerges between the purely sculptural, and the ephemeral but yet infinitely durable nature of polyurethane and fiberglass, which is not meant to be comical but paradoxical. As a subtle critique of the means-ends world of contemporaneity, rich in points of connection and hierarchies but held together without a center, the figure of Cronus points a finger at human powers that are too large to be controlled, too destructive, too Promethean. As a response, these mythological archetypes are calling on the viewer to allow the divine and ineffable to enter the falsely enchanted world of technology. Salient fragments of debris and plastic are traces of the modern world only ironically, viewing themselves as archaeological remnants of a past world into a remote future; what will remain indeed? As a human history, the world of modern technology is – like all histories – a narrative of decline, whereas the myth springs eternal and continuously returns to the source for renewal, in order to burst again into the world as power or might. In a world emptied out of meaning and bereft of a destination, “Breakfast at Cronus” reminds us that the ground of reality will be always superseded by spectacularly larger forces, deeply embedded in our unconscious, in the natural world, in artifacts and culture, opening a passage to pure, unbridled time – Chronos.