Chimera is for the first time mentioned in the sixth song of Iliad. It says that it had divine origin – it was lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle; it spewed fire out of its mouth… The head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a snake – this is the most natural description of it created by Homer, however in Theogony by Hesiod it has three heads and this is the way it is depicted in the famous bronze statue from Arezzo dated V century. In the middle of the chine it has a goat head, on the one end of the body there is a snake head and on the other – a lion’s one. In the sixth song of Aeneid “a fire-breathing Chimera” is again mentioned… With time Chimera turns into the “chimeric” notion. The word is used to denote impossible and incongruous things or a false idea and foolish fantasy. According to Lena Hades, a false idea and foolish fantasy is the very conceptual system of the modern culture that often uses notions that cannot be defined precisely.
For example, the notorious “mysterious Russian soul” mentioned by all foreigners coming to Russia - what is it? What does it look like?
Chimera of the Scientific and Technical Progress, 1997
Why is it the Russian soul that is “mysterious”? “Early Russian capitalism” – what is it? What associative visual array does imagination of the typical person draw? What is Bolshevism? Capitalism? What is a sexual revolution and what does an “American dream” look like? What is philosophy?
The artist who has succeeded in depicting Nietzsche’s philosophy rich in paradoxes and metaphors (today it is the only successful experience of the philosophic text visualization in the art history) has every right to deliver an artistic blow on the modern culture conceptual system itself.
In one of her interviews, to the question “What do you find more primary - a work or an image?” Hades mentioned a word-image, her ability to “see” a word and lightness with which a word turns into a figurative image in her pictures. May be, such lightness of word evocation is somehow connected with the linguistic talent of the artist who can speak six European languages and can read in three ancient ones. She is not the first to embody words in pictures; for example, Christopher Wool in his Black Book Drawings also “writes” words, but does it in the detached and mechanical way, as if words existed in the form of graphemes only and had no image flesh at all.
Hades sets another goal to herself – to come back to the notional flesh making a notion “alive”. Here she comes back to the “dead” and “life-giving” water of the Russian mythology saying that “dead” water put scattered parts of the body together, and “life-giving” water inspired life into the body. A notion body narrowed by the artist to the associative structure vivifies in the image of Chimera that like its ancestress from the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral is really ALIVE. One should not better view Hades’s Chimeras in reproductions - they should be viewed on the canvas itself when perceived graphical caricature of the image disappears and a person views an image in the picture as an ALIVE and LIVING object, as if the chimera ceased to be “a false idea and foolish fantasy” but became a REALLY alive creature not thought up by the artist, but existing in the nature.
Hades’s chimeras are not an artistic and graphical series, they are something more, it is rather “chimeric art” - Ars Chimaera, meant to “undress” notions to the very conceptual “skeleton”, to its visual and associative structure.
Chimeric art is not limited to the number of pictures and graphic works, it is inexhaustible, just as the number of notions used by a modern person. These are not only the Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood Chimeras, the Bolshevism Chimera, Capitalism Chimera, the Freedom Chimera, the Geopolitics Chimera, the Chimera of the Mysterious Russian Soul, the Chimera of the Early Russian Capitalism, the Chimera of the Scientific and Technical Progress (all of us being hostages of the latter), these are the Christianity Chimera, Faith Chimera, Orthodoxy Chimera, Market Chimera, Advertisement Chimera, as well – the “chimeric” list is endless: a modern person has a lot of chimeric toys…
The text was written by Alexander Panov. 2009