Alexei Chistyakov AL Gallery, St. Petersburg

[PotapovIvan]

May 19 - June 11, 2010
Alexei Chistyakov
Figures
Paintings, objects, video installation

«The true" I "- perfect as an unwritten number, lives
simultaneously at any point in space, at any point in time.
99 letters - 169 digits.
A. Chistyakov.

Digitized abstraction

When Roy Lichtenstein rasterized wide flowing brush strokes on a large canvas - it was primarily a gesture directed toward the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock, who claimed his technique drippinga living impulsive start painting. Large cell raster meant the advent of unification of any image - from the comics and photos to the artificial works with an all-out "printing machine".
Alexei Chistyakov long intended that any such things to take, because, having reached the perfection of the subtlest shades of beautiful texture of their pleasant red-ocher, brown and silver canvas, he felt it was time to expand abstraction toward reality, the move from the monotony of the certainty of ambiguity clarity. Ended with the Zen Buddhist meditation period, diving into a colorful canvas density, infinite and joyous variation of the same motif, reception, and was held out with specificity the reality of today's computer, and a number (not surprisingly), and E, and the most that any on a subject-visible.
Artist implanting in impregnated loosening the "land" of their canvases figures - chased graphics sharp and clear lines merges with texture tightly, forming a kind of chemical compound, the formula of which these figures and express. This state of abstraction refers us to the history of art half a century ago - from the "Target" and "Flags" Jasper Johns to the giant "comics" Liechtenstein, ie before and at the peak of pop art. Alex seems to be far from the whole story, it took a purely domestic issues related to the release of his paintings in the space of pure aesthetics and new age in the space of language, symbolic nature of which is clear and definite.
Although the number is just the highest abstraction, visualization in the picturesque plane makes it very concrete perception. With numbers like the artist suggests the possibility of reading his work in purely realist terms, because the image is not centered in the mystical depths of the canvas, but on most of its surface, the real texture of which is the most direct tactile-sensitive taktilizm.
Here are two canvases with images of female torsos, but in front of us rather silhouette spot configuration which is extremely generalized and abstract, however, the figure shown above using the template - this is not a serial, trademark, catalog, or even any other room. 161333 - this is Olga, and 1,212,033 - this is KATYA, that is, the numbers are the character - the name of art, its encrypted code. At another large-scale canvas set spaced numbers varying heights and configurations hide FLIGHTS inscription in a dream, that's canvas, which 14625201 - is a dream. So the artist tells us the message which we read not once, revealing the meaning of using the figures as a tool of painting. The steps he digitization of abstraction, it seems, is for the sake of the operation of double reading, where the principal is ultimately, of course, not a game of ciphers, and immersion in the painting, which we should feel with new intensity.

Gleb Yershov