Regnum

Exhibition
Gallery 21, Moscow, 2012

Regnum (installation detail), plaster, furniture, 2012

The objects in the exhibition are geometric bodies — plaster casts of the voids in found packing foam, the kind in which electronics are usually transported. Casts of the negative space of packages and containers. Gathered together, they reveal parallels with architecture, the avant-garde, nature, visual history. Studying and sorting these parallels, one discovers a kingdom of mute forms that lives by its own laws. Neither this world, nor — even more so — its properties, hierarchies and kinds have been described yet, so the researcher is given the captivating opportunity to be at once a bird and Jean-François Champollion, looking at an Egyptian rebus from beneath the clouds.

A kingdom, a domain, a sphere, a world of repeating gestures, messages and logistics schemes leaves behind no direct evidence of its existence. Only traces, hints, spaces. To know this world, one must describe it, compile a list, take inventory. For this, the traces must become visible and the spaces tangible. Functions, paths, meetings, situations acquire form and therefore must be ordered, accounted for and counted. This is a deliberately impossible task — the forms multiply endlessly, mutate, slip out of the catalogue, leaving it unfinished, incomplete, open, always implying at the end "to be continued…".

Nikolay Alekseev. Regnum (installation detail), plaster, furniture, 2012

Installation view

Ilya Dolgov on Nikolay Alekseev’s exhibition ‘Regnum’

"As in heaven, so on earth, in the seas and in all the abysses." Thus the old world sealed its uniformity. Regnum is the inalienable, innate right to reign. It is also the biological kingdom of animals or plants, united not by a monarch but by natural similarity. Proceeding from two causes for the equality of things — the metaphysical ruler above them and direct kinship between them — Nikolay Alekseev seeks a third kind of uniformity of everything with everything.

Platonic ideas, ideal in themselves, produced their imperfect copies — our world of matter and souls. The existence of ideas, understood literally, is another guarantor of the commonality of things. It is precisely these that the artist seeks — but no longer in the ideal, but in the very thick of this-worldly life.

A single matrix and its numerous offspring-impressions: this is how both sculptures and industrial products are made. Alekseev’s objects contain both. Casting plaster into the foam that packs household appliances, he obtains casts — casts of voids that carry things within themselves and are the generalised, blurred likeness, the idea, of those things. Combining the moulds, arranging plaster objects into webs of similarities and mutations, produces a hypnotic and dizzying effect: the gaze, having barely caught individual images, is disoriented again by the play of coquettish geometries, at once similar and dissimilar.

The images found by the artist (postcards, drawings, architectural photographs, reproductions of paintings, etc.) visibly show the history of this great migration. Direct or barely perceptible, ironic or awe-inspiring echoes of forms, structures, subjects and visual principles between architecture, organisms, machines, human crowds and scientific concepts stage a relay in which a new banner is passed each time to a random runner. A thin line separates these lace-like echoes from the pantheistic "all in all", but it is precisely this thin line that creates the tension and the plot of the exhibition.

Yielding to the ardour of a mystic archaeologist who takes the pyramids as evidence of a single (and mysterious) origin of civilisation, Nikolay Alekseev resolves the medieval dispute over whether ideas are real or merely a product of our minds — in favour of both sides. The result is an image of a world that, within itself (by itself), playfully creates endless differences, and the pathos of human reason, which again and again discovers the Kingdom behind these differences.

Catalogue:

It has become a bibliographic rarity.
But you can download the [ pdf ]

Works exhibited in

Things and Visions, MMOMA, Moscow, 2024
Detective, MMOMA, Moscow, 2018
Kandinsky Prize 2013, Udarnik Cinema, Moscow, 2013
Sopromat, Artplay, Moscow, 2012
Regnum, Gallery 21, Moscow, 2012

Publications

Detective. Catalogue. Moscow, 2018. P. 212.
Kandinsky Prize. Catalogue. Moscow, 2013. Pp. 92–93
Sopromat. Catalogue. Moscow, 2012. P. 67
Regnum. Catalogue. Moscow, 2012

Collections

Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow

Interview for the exhibition "Sopromat". DVD supplement to the catalogue.

Valentin Dyakonov’s lecture "The New Boring" at the Garage Museum, in which the Regnum exhibition is mentioned. Even without that, I recommend watching the lecture.