each day we would carve each day like a piece of vulture as a trail of days like an overlay brunette sculpture until suddenly last summer is that penned using people and maybe that’s not contend not being able to use people to borrow suddenly peaceful after all that taboo tomorrow those nightmares just to be able to tame their eyes to a sky not black with savage shame —Slava Mogutin, after Tennessee Williams, 2011

AS IF is proud to present a solo exhibition of new photographic work by the New York-based Russian artist and writer Slava Mogutin. Shot last year in the natural settings of New York and Colorado, this intimate series of portraits of friends and lovers signals a radical departure for an artist notorious for his ability to shock and provoke. Unlike his earlier work, which was focused primarily on urban portraiture and youth subcultures, these pictures display a lush experimentation with abstraction and color manipulation. The result is arguably his most personal and poetic body of work to date.

In conjunction with the show AS IF presents a limited edition artist portfolio in a boxed set of 25 chromogenic color prints, 5” x 5” each, signed and numbered on the verso, in an edition of 25.

“In Slava Mogutin’s Suddenly Last Summer, twenty-five photographic images of male subjects are set in traces of blurred summer color. They are taken with a Holga camera, whose plastic lens delivers the type of experimental accidents for which Jack Smith and Stan Brakhage strove. The resulting light leaks and multiple exposures allow Mogutin a new impressionist vision wherein a rich and refracted spectrum is layered into the penetrating light of day. These images are not erotic per se but emotional – an expression of love’s natural freedom as opposed to repression’s unnatural grip. In perfect contrast to Sebastian’s horrifying noonday martyrdom in Tennessee Williams’ play, the subjects of Mogutin’s Suddenly Last Summer live and perform in the open, in brilliant air, full color and natural light. These luminous pictures celebrate a polychrome Eden that has actually, largely arrived.” —Diego Cortez