Nastasia Nelyubina's "Two Girls Tasting A Pear."
Images to rub the emotions raw are part of the New Symbolists' determination to
hit their audience hard.
A two-day art show at Pushkinskaya 10 this weekend aims to shake you deep to your heart and bones.
Works expressing new artistic trends, music, pantomime and the penetrating aroma of incense combine to form a conceptual and symbolistic whole.
A hundred years Alexander Blok and Sergei Diaghilev led St Petersburg's nascent Symbolists, a group of local artists have understood that the work they are now engaged in is more than just a symbolist revival -- it is an advancement to the next stage of that aesthetic.
Lelya Gostintseva, director of the New Symbolist artistic union and art critic said, "Perestroika allowed conceptualism, post-modernism and computer graphics to rise up from the underground, and in a few years these approaches flooded the artistic scene of St Petersburg.
"We agree that all styles have the right to exist, but these ones are deliberately depriving themselves of emotional ground."
Protesting against current popular art trends -- vanity fairs as Gostintseva and her fellow-travelers call them -- new symbolists say they give priority to good taste, good style and good language, based on the individual skills of an artist.
They have been repulsed by new Russia's new art, which they say turns creative activity into fabrication, creators into interpreters and the arts into illusions.
"Emotions are something that exist always; they do not follow fashion. What is significant for us is to bring back spirituality, emotionality, handcraftness and inner connections with St Petersburg and its history," Gostintseva said.
"We try to revive the traditions of Russian chamber salons and the complex of arts practised in it."
New symbolists do not limit themselves to any particular artistic style, nor to any sort of art. Paintings, graphics, sculptures, collages, photographs, poetry, music and pantomime are some of the media currently used to lure spectators to their exhibitions -- future displays will also utilize ballet, cinema, fashion and theater genres.
"The spiral circle is being repeated, and the tendencies which worked 100 years ago are topical again," said Anastasia Nelyubina, St Petersburg artist and a member of the New ymbolist group.
Her "Melancholic Minotaur" will form the center of the "Alphabet of New Symbolism -- an Open Lesson" international exhibition, along with Georgy Nevsky's "Melancholy" moving sculpture.
Nelyubina and Nevsky's works will be accompanied by a clarinet piece specially composed for the show by Natalia Karsh -- "Melancholy" -- attacking the observer's consciousness from all possible sides. "We will use `Melancholy' incense if we manage to find some," said Nelyubina.
"In ancient Egypt Minotaur was a symbol of a troubled soul, enclosed in the jail of everyday problems," she added.
A total of 16 local and foreign creators will present their understandings of symbolism at Pushkinskaya 10.
Nelyubina, Nevsky and graphic artist Vladimir Yakobchuk are the best known of the locals participating in the exhibition. They will be joined by Finnish sculptor Markku Malmivaara and Swiss graphic artist Peter Augustin, both of whom acknowledge the merit of St Petersburg's new symbolist conceptual framework.
The new symbolists' manifesto, prepared by Vladimir Drozd, independent theoretician and scientist at the Russian Museum, rests on the following three principles: