Sergei Kiryuschenko's project "It's High Time to Get Down to Down-to-Earth Art"

At present Sergei Kiryuschenko's project "It's High Time to Get Down to Down-to-Earth Art" includes 2 videos of 7.5 and 4.5 min. (in cooperation with A.Sokolova and O.Yushko), 10 photographs and 10 serigraphies (in cooperation with O.Yushko) as well as 11 oil on canvas polyptychs. To describe the body of the project in development we need a single capacious image that would preserve the adequacy of scale of the author's idea and reflect the inner logics of the project. And this image would be... a spring.

If we imagine a compressed, brought to two dimensions spring the problem of interrelation of art and reality will become the circle limiting the area of conceptual experiments of Sergei Kiryuschenko. But if we unbend the spring, having released its inner energy, we'll find out that the new coil will bring the problem to the new level. This level suggests deeper and more extended solutions. And such solutions don't lose their integrity, completeness and self sufficiency in every taken case.

The starting point of the project (highly down-to-earth one) is a house, and not even a house, but a shed, a log house - half-decayed, half-destroyed construction in remote Belarusian village Uroda. There is no pseudo-high aesthetics of habitual art, but history and civilization gradually destroyed by nature; beams, like people, going to the ground and forming what their descendants will call later "cultural layer"; vertical axe turning into horizontal one... Painted step by step with the slogan "It's High Time to Get Down to Down-to-Earth-Art" the log house was put (literally in time dimension) into the basis of further Kiryuschenko's experiments. The first level of transformation took place. The first turn of the spring has coiled; the material object taken out of its natural context by means of art obtained a new quality as an artifact.

 

 

The next step from the reality of visible to the convention of thinkable was the transition from three to two dimensions - first to the screen, then to the canvas. Montage made on the basis of the photograph and video data made the newborn artifact immaterial, having moved the accent from physical to visual transformation. Continuing to work with the image that registers reality, the artist "rebuilt" it according to the new rules - the change of perspective, gradual absorption of the walls by color, hardly noticeable change of light. On the second coil of the spring the material object of the perceived world is reincarnated into the area of the artistic one.

 

 

Later process of transformation of the real shape into art object takes place just as an experiment with the visual. In the series of ten serigraphies the reality visually falls into fragments. From the initial log house the artist leaves just one wall - a photograph of the nature, a freeze from the video. Here we can read the whole slogan once again. The texture of the wood is seen, but the contrasts are underlined and the clots of red are vivid on the beams surface. Nine pieces that follow illustrate consecutive work on the schematization of the space, shape and color. As a result, the illusion of likeness is totally eliminated. The artist takes us to the space of pure abstraction, where the vertical axes of red diagrams pulsate on the conditionally grey background stitched by the horizontal force lines. Thus, being on the third coil of the spring, but totally denying the third (but not the fourth) dimension, the artist works out the laconic language for encoding the reality based on a fixed number of conditional formulas.

 

On the fourth coil the artist refines the technique and grammar of his new language. Separate canvases-screens build artistic reality of Sergei Kiryuschenko's huge polyptychs (just like the world is created from basic elements). The canvases are pierced by streams of energies moving in different directions along vertical and horizontal axes. The transmission of inner streams from one element of polyptych to another takes place along the bunches of multicolored wires-strings. They provide inner connection and the balance of the whole. Additional connection between the elements of the structure is shown through the marking of the canvases. Numbering the polyptych's components the artist refers to the rational vocabulary of the exact science, describing the world in universal abstract formulas. Using the first letters of the main slogan the artist also refers to the language as less abstract but still conditional sign system.

 

Last pieces of the series (e.g. "Red Corner") actualize the issue. Trying to realize the problem artist goes to the next coil of the spring. Today the key point of Kiryuschenko's work is the balance of the verbal and the visual or, to be more precise, the balance of the verbal and the painted - the word and the color.

The clash of the word meaning and the color (either the background color or the color the word is written with) always creates a new image, a new mistake, an absurdity shift. That makes us think once again how adequate our perception of images building up the reality is - as well as our notions - and how closely they are connected to each other. Anyway here as well as at the previous stages of the project Kiryuschenko asks us the main question - in which way we turn the visible into the conceptual, the real into the conditional and vice versa?

Lisaveta Mihalchuk