The artist continues to work with archives of digital images — made by himself or posted in open access by users of social networks.

Redrawn pictures, "instructive" comments to them, found images and objects add up to a material analogue of an Instagram or Facebook profile, in which something stirs, swarms, dances, turns into stone or a sun glare.

Blik [Glare] — a still from the video

I draw lions more often than other animals. Lions at palaces, on tourist souvenir stalls, cars, football clubs, Lazar Meir, familiar since childhood. When I draw lions, I recall Brecht’s poem "To the Poor Schoolmates from the Suburb"; I like this poem.

O. called and asked what I was drawing. Why a lion? The eyes of stone lions are filled with immense sadness. O. was drawing too at that moment. A fox. Why? They are cunning and beautiful.

Lion, oil on canvas, 80×40 cm, 2018

A small booklet by a local historian. A woman (I do not remember her name) worked all her life as a museum director. She addresses young readers with a call to find stones and love them, to describe in a diary in detail the reason for one’s love for these stones.

I envy her. I find it hard to find words.

Walking through a museum of fine arts, it is impossible to match a work to its time. Art always outruns it or lags shamelessly behind. How do the colonies and the slaughter wrought by Cortés relate to a pastoral picture with a subject from Longus’s novel "Daphnis and Chloe"?

Once, Ilya and I wanted to make Voronezh a city of rejected monuments. Steles, busts, memorial plaques, tombstones. Everything that, due to a change of power, public sentiment or something else, turned out to be unwanted or forgotten.

Stone, oil on canvas, 40×30 cm, 2018

Stone and Moss, oil on canvas, 50×60 cm, 2018

K. and I were walking past a church. I said it would be nice to hold an exhibition there. We decided to go in and ask (K. decided; I don’t know German). In the refectory they offered us cocoa and said they would not mind an exhibition. Above the altar, a large chandelier hung at an angle. From below, from the floor, rebar stretched up towards it (also at an angle).

On the way out of the church I bought a postcard with a strange landscape.

Chandelier, oil on canvas, 80×40 cm, 2018

I have seen most slag heaps from the window of a car or train.

In Maxim Gorky’s tale "The Simplon Tunnel", underlined in pencil: "…the road is paved with stone, but seems soft as velvet; one wants to stroke it with one’s hand."

Several times I climbed to the top of a crumbling slag heap.

Tanya sent me Hamlet in Lozinsky’s translation and an article about the "mole of history". There, Aesop’s fable is retold about the mole who decided he had regained his sight.

Slag Heaps, oil on canvas, 180×80 cm, 2018

video, 6'00 min — looped

Twins, video, 6'00 min — looped

At the "Party of the Ugly", Yaroslav played something from American 80s. I imagine it was Pere Ubu from Cleveland. The play by Alfred Jarry after which the band is named — I am embarrassed to admit — I have never read. Vanya dances.

Alexei Yurievich sent a story about how a sculptor by the name of Alekseev, before the giant sculpture of Joseph Stalin was welded shut, snuck inside Stalin and installed there a model of the same sculpture (life-size).

I liked the story enormously. I know a similar story about how Hans Arp made masks and brought them to the Cabaret Voltaire. But at that moment it did not occur to me to tell it.

The Party of the Ugly, oil on canvas, 60×40 cm, 2018

The first drawing by Nikolai Ge, made in childhood (hard to imagine him as a child), is a little horse. For the exhibition about Voronezh, I asked Vanya to draw a horse on the wall — not just any horse, but Ge’s little horse, which probably no one except Nikolai Nikolaevich and his family had ever seen. The drawing turned out amazingly accurate; that is exactly how I had imagined it. The horse, encountered at the entrance and the exit of the exhibition, caught the eye and frightened a little. Vanya’s drawing, like Ge’s, has not survived.

In other people’s art books I sometimes find redrawn pictures. I have never encountered more than one inserted sheet. The moment of choice is always interesting. Why, out of many pictures, does one have a paralysing effect?

The gaze of Medusa turns to stone.

Stories about Stones, watercolour on paper, 32×24 cm, 2018

I take two tablets of vinpocetine and two of ginkgo biloba, to remember Mr Malone’s doubts at the top of a spreading ginkgo and the rustle of periwinkle on D.'s grave.

Periwinkle and Ginkgo, watercolour on paper, 84×60 cm, 2018

In Aesop’s fable, the mother brings a grain of frankincense to the mole who has regained his sight. The mole recognises it as a stone. I like this error.

The Step, oil on canvas, 40×30 cm, 2018

Works

Curatorial Projects

Design: Nikolay Alekseev's Workshop, 2024 / 2026

You can support our educational projects [on Boosty]

Contacts:

Contacts:

You can support our educational projects [on Boosty]

Design: Nikolay Alekseev's Workshop, 2024 / 2026

Curatorial Projects

Works