04/3-13/2013 at the Museum of Modern Fine Arts in Minsk (47 Independence Ave.), Uladzimir Lapo's exhibition "STEP INTO DUSK".

Uladzimir Lapo is a creative person whose artistic activity goes beyond the generally accepted styles and directions. An artist, graphic designer, sculptor, creator of installations, writer in one person, he embodies the point of contact between destructive and creative processes, reality and fiction, artistic and objective reality.

As a representative of marginal culture, Uladzimir Lapo is on the border of environments, groups, and systems, feels the influence of their conflicting norms and values, while constructing a personal reality, extreme individuality, which is manifested in the way of life, forms of self-expression, and methods of creative activity.

According to Park, "such a person steadily becomes (compared to his immediate cultural environment) an individual with a wider horizon, a more refined intellect, more independent views." Park assumes the marginal person as an unconditionally positive, constructive element. Another sociologist, Everett Stonequist, considers the marginal person as a key-personality in the contact of cultures. This understanding of the individual can be fully attributed to the author of the project - a British citizen, a traveler and a cosmopolitan.

The exhibition project STEP INTO DUSK presents works of graphics from different years and sculpture made in direct cast technology. Using this method, the author is responsible for modeling, preliminary creation of a working copy in favor of a real object. Thus, it limits interference, introduces an element of randomness, determines a measure of personal intervention in the process of creating an art object.

Modern art, possessing an innumerable number of alternatives, reveals the role of choice as a volitional act, as a result of which preference is given to one or another mental (idea, concept, model, format) or real object. In this case, the author makes such a choice, due to which the object is defined and represented almost as it is. At the same time, in Lapo's sculpture there is no place for the naturalism of the image, it is not ready-made, here the experiment comes to the fore, the emotional intensity of the process of creation and perception is determined.

The technology of direct casting was known in the Middle Ages, in a sense the "dark time", which justifies the name of the project. But the author does not emphasize the mentioned historical period, if he does turn to the category of time, then in a completely different aspect.

Natalya Patorskaya, curator of the exhibition, researcher of the exhibition department of the Museum of Modern Fine Arts