"Freedom is nothing but an empty phantom when one class can starve another with impunity. Equality is an empty phantom when the rich, through monopoly, enjoy the right of life and death over their fellow beings. An empty phantom too is the republic when counter-revolution operates day after day, fixing the price of provisions at a level that three-quarters of citizens cannot pay without shedding tears… For four years only the rich have profited from the revolution… Only by putting an end to the brigandage of merchants… only by providing food to the sans-culottes³ will you draw them to the side of the revolution and unite them around the constitutional laws."

At work I have a morning ritual, a simple task — to run the test page of an inkjet printer so that the print head does not clog with ink. The test page with its grid of four colours is an interface (machine—human) like a smile at a meeting. I try to answer the machine by redrawing the test grid. Twenty-two of our meetings will be presented at the exhibition.

The dictionary of metaphors born of the first industrial revolution and then of the French Republic — with its doubles, phantoms, vampires and automata — is still being carefully dusted. A phantom watching over the safety of the bookbinding wanders through streaming services¹, contemporary art fairs and PDF files with encrypted signatures.

IV

III

3. During the French Revolution, this was the name for the revolutionary-minded workers of manufactories and workshops, and other labourers. The name ‘sans-culottes' means they did not wear the short breeches (culottes) of those most often depicted in paintings of the time.

2. There are two serious books in Russian by Yakov Mikhailovich Zacher (Zacher, Ya. M. ‘The Enragés'. Far-Left French Democrats, 1792−1794 — Leningrad: State Printing House named after Evg. Sokolova, 1930; and Zacher, Ya. M. The Movement of the Enragés — Moscow: Sotsekgiz, 1961), but one must try very hard to find and read them.

1. Here one might recall both the recent films of the distinguished Jim Jarmusch and the much-talked-about debutant Julian Radlmaier.

The starting point of the exhibition is a choice that troubles me: the adjective for "phantom". It is amusing that the same phrase would appear a little later, through the Romantics, in Pushkin. I am, of course, worried about how an empty phantom should look — whether it resembles a casket, whether it has anything in common with Holbein’s paintings (his surname translates as "hollow bone"), why Pushkin placed a snake in the skull, and other questions.

II

Not much is known about Jacques Roux² — a priest, participant of the French Revolution and leader of the Enragés faction. But a fragment of his 1793 petition, in which Jacques Roux radically criticises the language of the bourgeois revolution, multiplies across the web (from Wikipedia to social media statuses). Let one more copy appear in this text:

I

Empty Ghost, installation view

A favourite poem from Paul Éluard's 1971 collection is called "The Dog". In the first line Éluard addresses the dog, calling it "warm", and ends the poem with the demand: "Easy, dog!".

Between warmth and calm (which are not the "warmth" and "calm" we are used to), the locomotive of history slowly picks up speed.

A year or two ago A. told the story of writing letters to Maurice Nikolaevich Vaksmakher (the collection’s translator). I became curious about what the first letter was about, but for some reason I did not ask.

In the book’s illustration, the canary hypnotist demonstrates his trick. Frozen into timelessness, the photographs of a hand and a bird turn into an exquisite corpse. Art is very much like magic tricks: disappear, appear, escape death.

Empty Ghost, installation view

Dog, oil on canvas, 90×70 cm, 2021

The Canary Hypnotist, oil on canvas, 90×60 cm, 2021

A display case with Egyptian cats in the Vatican museums. Both in Memphis and in Rome they passionately compiled and then preserved countless lists. Pets are recorded and safely kept. I too love lists; some of my favourites were made by Sei Shōnagon.

In the film "Sans Soleil", Chris Marker noted a list of things that make the heart beat faster. I prefer the list of things that remind one of the past but are no longer of any use. There one finds "a patterned mat with frayed edges, with threads sticking out. Folding screens with Chinese-style paintings, blackened and torn. An artist who has lost his sight… Fabric the colour of purple grapes when it has faded. A lover of easy escapades when he is old and feeble. The garden of a connoisseur of refined beauty, where all the trees were destroyed by fire. A pond remains, but duckweed and water weeds have already begun to choke it…"

This list is not so obvious; it has a pleasant gap that truly makes the heart beat faster.

Cats, oil on canvas, 100×120 cm, 2021

At work I have a morning ritual, a simple task — to run the test page of an inkjet printer so that the print head does not clog with ink. The test page with its grid of four colours is an interface (machine-human) like a smile at a meeting. I try to answer the machine by redrawing the test grid. Twenty-two of our meetings (one working month) were presented at the exhibition.

paper, test print, coloured pencils, 29×21 cm, 2021

This painting, not the most typical of Oleg Vasiliev, was redrawn by him from a popular photograph on newspaper front pages. Compositionally, the artist cropped the horizontal photograph to a square and made the government building, with the silhouette of a Stalinist skyscraper in the smoke, resemble a ship. I first came across this work printed on the cover of Sotheby’s New York sale catalogue of 2008. To fit the work onto a vertically oriented cover, the designer had to crop it once more, to a book format. I redrew this cropped version, making its movement from the event towards Claude Monet’s "Impression" more distinct.

"The White House. October 1993" by Oleg Vasiliev, oil on canvas, 40×30 cm (a pair), 2021

This summer Elena Shmakova made an amazing work — at the exhibition she presented a neon line from a Britney Spears song popular in the late nineties. I was charmed by its property of turning flowing neon into a rhythmic structure. Those who have heard this catchy melody even once cannot read it without singing it, and vice versa.

I have always wanted to be part of that childlike ease of finding gaps, so with the author’s permission I redrew this gap, sparkling with joy.

Elena Shmakova’s work "Hit Me Baby One More Time", watercolour pencil on paper, 30×20 cm, 2021

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Design: Nikolay Alekseev's Workshop, 2024 / 2026

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