SOME WORDS ABOUT MY WORKS

1

Any art ... is the issue of designing ways

to overcome our endless progress.

Malevich

"About new systems in art"

      Modern science, beginning from Galileo and Copernicus, produced a radical decentralization of the Universe. It is not only realization of the off-center position of the Earth in space, but also decentralization of thinking about the world in the process of comprehension. Mathematically described universe became autonomous from the observer. Thinking about the world, essentially independent of the thinker and able to do without him, became possible. We have lost the right to confer the nature with our meanings, mankind became "excessive" (Sartre) in the “ ice-cold” world where there is no top or bottom, no center, no periphery, nothing that would make it a place designed for humans.

      Emptiness and abandonment that came with the awareness of this fact, in many ways inspired the modernist approach in art. But the real response to this challenge became postmodern. Dushane and Wittgenstein's demarche, tried simply to deny rational discourse as subjective and relative. After this rebellion the awareness of the inevitability of direct and final value of scientific and mathematical truth gradually began, manifested in the digitalization and the attempt of art to "lean" to science as a new Revelation.

        In this case there is a danger of loss of the primary (since Kant) understanding of art as having an internal goal-setting, which means excessiveness from a utilitarian point of view. It tends to be a proclamation, archival evidence, research.

      The use of analog techniques helps me to represent the idea of randomness, spontaneity of artwork, well-suited to our shaky "optional" but, also, an especially valuable position in the Universe. Instead of maximum transparency of the medium, which tries to show the annihilation of art as anthropomorphic relic of the culture, I aim to emphasize the opacity of the photographic surface. The lith grain is quite self-sufficient, so its texture becomes a through character in many works. Resembling a lithograph, very non-digital structure of the image allows me to emphasize the "unnecessary" intrinsic value of human subjectivity and introversion, despite the victory of media and scientific discourse, and even because of it.

2

 What took the place of photography before it was invented?.. You expect me to answer - drawing, painting. In fact, the exact answer will be a memory.

Berger

"Ways of seeing"

       The direct and perfect photographic image wants to be objective, to exclude the mnemonic effects and time aberrations. This raises the complexity of showing the intuitive perception. I mean not only the broad possibilities of manipulating with "reality", finally remaining on the memory card, but also in the effects of the image plasticity.

       The optics of our vision has a limited spot of sharpness, to help us to snatch an event from the undifferentiated stream of visual information. Moreover, high-resolution images, clear and colored, are stored in memory for a split second, in the short-term "iconic" memory. In all other cases, images are often decomposed into elements or "stored" in a blurred, almost monochromatic form to save space in memory and for quick recognition. The color is generally stored in the memory in exceptional cases, and often in fragments, where the symbolic or emotional load of memories is required.

       Conventional binary logic is very usable for daily utilitarian use and is therefore used in computer programming. But thanks to binary algorithms (Yes-no, 0-1) the computer doesn’t understand probability and intuitive tasks. So strangely distorted or shaded image of numbers or pieces of text (s.c. captures) are widely used to distinguish bots from humans among the site visitor. Bots usually can’t recognize symbols, easily recognized by humans due to their intuition.

       Lith-texture is spontaneous and uncontrollable unlike digital "pixel" raster. Therefore, it is a good illustration of the modern concept of memory and recognition as manifestations of quantum processes in the synapses of the brain, which implement probabilistic, non-binary algorithms of thinking.

3

In ... a state of obsolescence, the photo seems to be entering into a new relation to aesthetic production. This time, however, photography functions in the direction reverse to the former destruction of the medium, becoming — just under the guise of its own obsolescence -  the way that could be described as the act of reinvention of medium.

Rosalind Kraus

“Reinventing the medium”

       It is naive to assume that nowadays it is possible to create actual art, simply using the techniques of modernist photography. The artificiality and kitsch sometimes played in the guise gummi-bi-chromate prints with the imminent twilight, which showed the "besieged situation of social class". In the ancient times the art was branded by Plato as "the imitation of imitation", double mimesis. And now immersion in old techniques and related allusions can be justified semantically only as "the correlate of a correlate," the attempt to study factors contributing to the desire for the aestheticization of the past.

       The experience of the immersion in the entourage of the past,  when “everything was well”, is extremely important for the masses.  This explains the undying interest in the work of the Wanderers and the masters of the silver age, from thousands of art lovers. Basically, postmodern and even Kantian discourse of relativity of perception is not yet included in the universal popular mind. Therefore, we still tend to mythologize, and then dogmatize absolute beauty and enduring advantage of past styles and techniques.

       For me, the revival of the analog photo can’t be reduced to impressionistic, pictorial rebellion against the digital academism. Not only in photographic technology but also in associative related topics – Freudian and left-social conflicts – we can find the opportunity of seeing something  natural, chthonic, showing itself through the usual rational shape of the  frame with its composition, and social order.

       So I often combine graphics, sculpture, lith-process, and a subsequent digital post-processing and printing. Barely visible manipulation with natural grain structure is like genetic engineering, and the enlarged image generated by using almost biological, infectious lith-development makes the frame resembling the eyepiece of the microscope.

4

... O that awful deepdown torrent…

James Joyce, «Ulysses»

       For the modernist art, it is also important the "flow of consciousness" principle, most vividly expressed in the literature of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. Subsequently, this method was used by surreal artists. I build my series, using the same principle. I almost never use a coherent and logically harmonious narrative. The composition of my narrative should be spontaneous, a bit loose and chaotic, like the texture of the image surface. This is important to ensure that the project does not turn into reportage; the silence was not defeated by the storytelling.

ILYA IVANKIN